What is Search Engine Spam?

What is Search Engine Spam?

Search engines make billions of dollars each year selling ads. Most search engine traffic goes to the free, organically listed sites. The ratio of traffic distribution is going to be keyword dependent and search engine dependent, but I believe about 85% of Google’s traffic clicks on the organic listings. Most other search engines display ads a bit more aggressively than Google does. In many of those search engines, organic listings get around 70% of the traffic. Some sites rank well on merit, while others are there due exclusively to ranking manipulation.

In many situations, a proper SEO campaign can provide a much greater ROI than paid ads do. This means that while search engine optimizers—known in the industry as SEOs—and search engines have business models that may overlap, they may also compete with one another for ad dollars. Sometimes SEOs and search engines are friends with each other, and, unfortunately, sometimes they are enemies.

When search engines return relevant results, they get to deliver more ads. When their results are not relevant, they lose market share. Beyond relevancy, some search engines also try to bias the search results to informational sites such that commercial sites are forced into buying ads.

I have had a single page that I have not actively promoted randomly send me commission checks for over $1,000. There is a huge sum of money in manipulating search results. There are ways to improve search engine placement that go with the goals of the search engines, and there are also ways that go against them. Quality SEOs aim to be relevant, whether or not they follow search guidelines.

Many effective SEO techniques may be considered somewhat spammy.

Like anything in life, you should make an informed decision about which SEO techniques you want to use and which ones you do not (and the odds are, you care about learning the difference, or you wouldn’t be reading this).

You may choose to use highly aggressive, “crash and burn” techniques, or slower, more predictable, less risky techniques. Most industries will not require extremely aggressive promotional techniques. Later on I will try to point out which techniques are which.