Crossing the Line into Black Hat SEO - Saying No
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The journey begins at the time a decision is made to optimize a site as an SEO expert. There are some jobs that require a negative. Most sites that require the services of an SEO lack content, and may sometimes insist that they do not need content, requesting that the SEO expert use other means to achieve high rankings.
Any SEO technique that does not seek to deliver relevant and useful content in the form of information or downloadables (free), and intends to achieve ranking only through exploiting inherent flaws in the search engines' algorithms compromises the long term integrity of that site.
This is because the site is then subject to such vagaries as the search engines changing their algorithms, or any other factor that is a variable. The only thing that stays constant is that search engines consider content important to the browsing experience of the site.
For websites that insist on not adding content, or that refuse to follow the recommendations of the search engines, only one answer can be given to them: a firm no. The results of complying with such a website owner's wishes could include litigation at one end, and being banned from the SERPs at the other.
Duplicating Content
This trick still draws from the premise that "relevant content is hard." Imitation is a clear indication of lack of creativity. Imitation in print is plagiarism; nobody seems to have any problems insisting that plagiarism is wrong. But then again, print is a highly regulated media with strong legal protection for copyrighted material (unless said material is online) [And even there, many of the protections are still in place, the hard part is enforcing them --Ed.].
The Internet, on the other hand, is a nightmare morass of billions of sites on millions of servers. Page jacking is old; article duplicating is in. Using software that can convert whole articles into new forms, black hat web masters building dozens of sites a day can duplicate entire sites, replicating the content of dozens of sites and spawning them across the net. Using the numbers game to befuddle the search engines, they stay steps ahead of full detection by destroying their "footprints."
This behavior is justified by moans of how relevant content is hard to find, or very expensive. The real problem is the "overnight success" mentality, which assumes that success can be achieved literally overnight (or at least in a very short time). This is a fallacy perpetuated by the MTV generation, which wants perfect bodies, lots of money and number one rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN (sounds like paradise).
This behavior is fueled by sites that are built simply to generate AdSense revenue, and by web masters to whom the user's search experience is not even on the list of their considerations.
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