A very sobering blog post up at SearchEngineWatch, White Hats: This is Why You’re Getting Beaten, about how the bad guys are mopping the floor with the good guys.
(and is anybody else getting tired of the hat metaphor?)
Anyway, as good a point as is made there, we’d like to ask, “Is it really that way?” Because here’s the thing: attracting traffic to your website is all about converting sellers, via ads and point of sale. No matter what, that’s the goal.
Now, no matter how many search engines you fool, the search engine isn’t the one spending the money; a person is. And the person who gets to your site after you’ve rigged the search engine to come up as a false result in order to throw a page full of spam in their face is going to leave angry without spending any money and go someplace else anyway. So really, the ones doing blatant black hat SEO are actually just piddling away time and money anyway.
Kind of like spammers, there’s always the few sites that will never go straight. But they’re getting a lot of false hits and a few legit but very dumb users. Remember, all traffic is not created equal. We’d rather get 5,000 visits a month from the cream of the intellect market than 500,000 a month from bots and dopes.
