Using Overtly Manipulative Techniques

Using Overtly Manipulative Techniques

While there will always be ways to manipulate the search engines, there is no telling if you will eventually get caught and lose your rankings if you optimize your siteusing overtly deceptive techniques. In any business such as SEO, there will be different risk levels.

Search engines try hard not to flag false positives (label good sites as spam), so there is usually a bunch of slack to play with, but many people also make common mistakes, like incorrectly using a 302 redirect, or not using specific page titles on their pages, or allowing spiders to index multiple URLs with the same content. If you are ever in doubt if you are making technical errors, feel free to search a few SEO forums or ask me.

The search engines aim to emulate users. If you design good content for users and build a smart linking campaign, eventually it will pay off.

New aggressive techniques pop up all the time. As long as they are available, people will exploit them. People will force the issue until search engines close the loophole, and then people will find a new one. The competitive nature of web marketing forces search engines to continuously improve their algorithms and filters.

In my opinion, the ongoing effort of keeping up with the latest SEO tricks is usually not worth it for most webmasters. Some relational database programmers and people with creative or analytical minds may always be one step ahead, but the average business owner probably does not have the time to dedicate to keeping up with the latest tricks.

Tying ethics to SEO techniques is a marketing scam. Either a technique is effective, or it is not. There is nothing unethical about being aggressive. You probably do not want to take big risks with domains you cannot afford to have blacklisted, but there is nothing wrong with owning a few test sites.

Following Google’s Guidance

Some sites that are not aggressively promoted still fall out of favor on occasion. As a webmaster following Google’s guidelines, you still can not expect Google to owe you free traffic. You have to earn it by making others cite your website.