The Spam Chronicles: What’s So Special About SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 11 of October , 2007 at 4:29 pm

Talk to some people and you are a spammer the moment you use your keywords, or link to another website, especially if it yours. Some of the crazy things people call spam truly amaze me. I mean, it’s SEO. You would think that everyone would want to learn it and get good at it. But some people would rather just call you a spammer and hang you in town square. If these people are right, what’s so special about SEO? Are you sure that what you are doing is legitimate SEO and not spam?

Here’s a short list of some of the things I’ve heard people call spam despite it the obvious SEO benefits:

• Linking to your own website from an off site blog
• Using keyword-rich content that is above a certain keyword density threshold
• Selling links
• Linking to or from unrelated websites
• Using special effects like bold or italicized text in conjunction with keywords to increase the SEO benefits
• Owning more than one website or blog in a niche

I understand not everyone agrees with all of these tactics, but does that make them spam? The definition of spam includes an attribute of non-solicitation. In the case of e-mail spam, for instance, spam would be unsolicited commercial e-mail. If you are simply targeting keywords using websites, blogs, and other legitimate web marketing tools then that can’t be spam since the entities being targeted are the search engines, which encourage these practices through their policies and algorithms. If they reward you for using them, it isn’t spam. If they penalize you then it might be spam. The last time I looked, each of these strategies were legitimate internet marketing tactics, hence not spam.

You tell me: What’s so special about SEO?

                      Category: SEO