SEO Marketing: How To Play Russian Roulette With The Search Engines

It comes as no surprise that when a good thing is made available to the masses, there is always going to be some people who want to game the system. Instead of playing by the rules, they use illegal methods in an attempt to jump to the head of the line. SEO Marketing is no different

Since the majority of website traffic comes from places like The Google and Yahoo, it was only a matter of time before the people who dwell in moral twilight figured out some techniques to cheat their way to a better ranking for their website

The problem is these people lose track of the real objective. Wendy Boswell at About.com writes, "Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem." Yes blackhatters get a quick boost in site ranking and more than likely make a fast buck (their goal anyway) but over the long term they run the risk of being banned by the very search engines that could really grow their business into a traffic generating, money making dynamo that last for years.

Want to play Russian roulette with the search engines? Try these techniques:

1. Link Farming
You have probably seen those sites with a directory page that contains hundreds of links. The problem is they bear no relation to what the actual website is all about. Putting up links about mortgage loans, acne, the history of wastebaskets etc when your site is about the quality of fishing in Great Falls Montana would be an example of link farming. There was a time when the search engines were okay with this but as is usually the case, people went overboard with it.

Make sure the links on your directory page relate directly or indirectly to the content on your website. In fact save yourself the time and effort by focusing on getting one way links to your site. A couple of quality one way links are worth way more than thousands of links unrelated to your niche.

2. The Sybil Attack
One of the most famous TV movies of all time is Sybil: The Girl with 16 Different Personalities starring Sally Field. This is the blackhat foundation for setting up mirror sites. By creating multiple web sites with the exact same content but different domain addresses, blackhatters are able to trick the search engines into ranking their main website higher. Sybil attacks can also turn quite nasty and take control of large scale computer networks including peer to peer systems which are quite vulnerable.

3. Cloaking
Cloaking software was an underground rage a few years back. The concept is to present two types of content: One for the actual visitors to your website, the other was for the search engine spiders that crawl your web pages looking for updating content that has been keyword optimized. This was an elaborate way of getting the search engines to show a page they normally would not.

All of this may sound ridiculous and totally unnecessary. Yes on both counts. The easiest way to stay on the good side of the search engines is to give them exactly what they want; namely a website with good content (preferably unique) that grows at a more natural pace. This maybe a slow way to success for some people but it's safe and it works. You are building a business which hopefully will be successful for a very long time. Do not let anyone talk you into putting it at risk by using blackhat techniques.