I like the Internet, it is a wonderful reporitory of information, if you know where to look, it is also a huge vast black hole of useless data designed to make a quick buck. An entire industry has cropped up that is out to ‘game’ the search engines. The favorite of which is Google. Google has become a huge, albeit unwitting player in the Internet game.
With Google having such a large proportion of the Search Engine traffic it is not surprising that they are the biggest target. Their Adsense program has led to huge monetary gains for sleazy sites. The scams are endless, one of the favorites is to register a URL that is a misspelled version of a well known site and load it with ad’s. When a person mistypes the address, and this is a numbers game, they are taken to a scam site. I don’t think I want to cite any exact examples, as I have no interest in assisting these people. Every click on one of these sites represents money. It is a very small amount, but those fractions of pennies add up.
These sites are insidious and should be shut down. But, who wants to act as the policeman? The search engine companies are caught in a catch twenty two, but are they fueling the fire? Advertisers want the exposure, the search engines want the revenue, but, are the advertisers getting a decent bang for their buck?
A worse kind of scam is the ‘Empty Nest’ web site. This is the situation where you do a Google search on a company, a person, or in my experience today, a restaurant. As a frequent user of Google, I decided to look up a local eating establishment in order to find a menu. I plugged in the restaurant name and the small town that we live in. There were thousands of hits!
I plowed my way through several pages. Each one said essentially the same thing, they promised menu’s and reviews, yet every single one of them had the same ‘be the first to leave a review’, and ‘be the first to upload the menu’ advice.
These web sites, and there are many, somehow they have garnered ‘Google Juice’ without any real content. As with most data, the basic information is available for a cheap price. All you need is Yellow Pages in a digital version, a little programming know how, and suddenly you have a 20,000, 50,000, or even more, page website.
Do not think that this is limited to Reastaurants, Hotels, or Stores, in fact every possible industry and service suffers from the same abuse. I know that Matt Cutts of the Google Web Spam team is acutely aware of the issue, he has talked about it on more than one occasion. Yet nothing seems to have happened to date.
The ‘Empty Nest’ web site is a totally useless resourse. Of course the ‘Empty Nest’ always has that advertising ‘juice’. I like sites with meat! Yet the ‘Empty Nest’ seems to rule the internet at the moment.
Simon Barrett
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8 users commented in " What Is Wrong With The Web – SEO And Search Gone Wild "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThis too shall pass.
You make a great point. I used to observe mature industries and one sure way to know when an industry has become mature is when lots of scams spring up. To your point, search is now clearly mature. But Google has morphed before, and I believe they’ll get this figured out as well.
One thing that has me worried is the number of URLs I try to find that are now dead. This is likely a function of the recession, but I can’t help but wonder what will become of all the good URLs out there. For now, many seem to be taken over by the fake sites you’re mentioning.
Great points you’re making,
Steve
I started noticing this last year when I was searching for a hotel. I was shocked at the amount of top results that were hardly ever actual hotels. Instead my results ranged from review websites, travel websites or listing websites which hardly ever had links to the hotels themselves. Almost 80% of the time these sites were full of ads or pop ups and the “useful information” they deceptively lead you to, was usually advertisements if it even existed.
It is pretty sad that the web is at this level since I’d like to continue regarding the Internet as a source of vast useful information. Unless we understand the intricacies of the web, the average web user is simply pushed around unwillingly supporting this “Empty Nest” Syndrome.
Recently I launched my own website. Naively I just assumed you put your site on the web and away you go. I knew nothing about SEO but I soon learned, it was a case of having to. The first month I had no idea really what I was supposed to be doing in getting my site noticed by the search engines. When the penny finally dropped and I came to realize about keywords and especially anchor text key words in blogs and replying to blogs, also I found one of the most important tools is original content on your site, it came quite easily in boosting my page position. Having said that, been stuck in front of a pc 24/7 and this is what it takes, is hard work. When I say original content, I don’t refer to writing about something that nobody else has, as this would be extremely difficult unless you have a new product that only you know about, I mean writing it in your own words. I have spent hours rewriting articles for my site and to publish them later on, which brings me to another point. If you have written anything new regardless of the word count, always publish it to your site first and then wait for the search engines to crawl it. Only then go ahead and publish it to the numerous article and blog sites available. This at times seems like you are waiting around forever but it will pay in the long run and while you are waiting write another. You don’t require a degree in English and to the professional writers who do write for a living in may appear sloppy but you are not aiming the content at them. As long as it is readable and makes sense to the public who are interested in your product then great, plus get your key words that are relevant to your site part of the article. When I started out my site appeared on page 27 of Google and this was out of 60 million results that Google pulled up. Within 10 weeks which does seem lengthy but it soon passes I am now on page 1. My other key words pulled up over 240 million results and I am currently on page 2 for this. I have had no training in SEO and I have not paid for a single thing in terms of links or help from any SEO companies. It is boring and tedious but you just have to stick at it, day in and day out. At first the rewards come slow and there are times when you actually think you aren’t making any ground but after 3-4 weeks I did start to notice my position gradually improving and this then gives you the boost to continue. It’s not rocket science but you do have to be dedicated and to have vast amounts of patience to accomplish your goal. You only get out what you put in and this is just the way of the world.
Expect to have to wait awhile. Rarely do results come over night but if you’ve studied up and listened to the professionals, it could get you results a little sooner.
This is why IYP’s are growing at an exponential rate. Becase of it’s association with the Yellow Pages, people know exactly what they will get when they search. The sites like DexKnows.com, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc are transfering data from print to digital. Whoever has the content and the relationships with SMB’s will win. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo don’t have the proper sales channel to develop those relationships to gain the content…yet.
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By informing each other, we protect each other.
Sincerely,
Amen brother. I’m typing “Spam, Mongolia” just to see what I get. I’m quessing a lot of spam, but I’ll shunt it to your inbox. What can I say? Just the way, I roll. Thanks for making the internet fun, while it lasted though.
More to the point, I’ve noticed that if you partially spell a search term and click on the options that auto fill presents, you are quarrenteed to go somewhere other than your intended destination. Hate that.
i agree 100%. it’s especially annoying when you’re on a mobile–slow–and you *never* ever find what you tried to find!
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