How Spam Is Killing SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 22 of January , 2008 at 1:12 pm

SEO and SEO specialists have a bad rep. The problem isn’t that SEO is a wicked science. The problem is more that it is a legitimate science and that’s why it’s so easy and so popular to game.

Because search engine optimization works, scammers, spammers, and other wild creatures try to use it to game the search engines and the entire Web community. They’re actually pretty good at it. Since blogging has become popular, a new kind of search engine spam has risen to popularity as well. I don’t if it has a name other than Spam, but it isn’t any less destructive and no less a nuisance.

What spammers are doing is using your RSS feeds to scrape your content and have it conveniently reloaded to their own blogs. They even so go far as to give you an attribution link. Hey, they’re following the rules! Or so it seems. But they also put those AdSense ads right next to your content in hopes that they’ll earn a buck or two off of your content. They’ll also link to another website where they attempt to sell services or affiliate programs. Are they successful? I don’t know. I suspect some of them may be, but others may not be. It depends on how well their spam sites are designed. I do know this: They rely a lot on the traffic from your blog when you approve their trackbacks. That’s why I am trying not to approve those comments when I see them. I don’t want my good readers being taken in by destructive spam. And if these sites get most of their traffic from the trackbacks to the sites where they are stealing content from, well it just makes sense that the way to shut them down is to stop approving their trackbacks. Then they’ll get no traffic.

Category: SEO

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