Dark Side Within the Internet: SEO

You may probably have heard about SEO in the context of success online, but are you sure you know what it is? Moreover, do you know what is bad about it? In the following article, we will tell you what SEO deals with and tell what harm it has. This will be an unexpected topic for writing about bad sides of the Internet, what will make your paper more interesting for others.

Definition of SEO

SEO – is a search engine optimization. Basically, it is a complex of measures to make a certain website higher in search results, which is based on the fact, that search engine algorithms are not perfect. Usually, the search results are sorted by the relevance of the website to the request, popularity of the web resource, the date of the last update, the periodicity of the updates, unicity of the content, etc. The aim of the SEO specialists is to place a certain website on the first place in the list of search results for the key requests. The higher aim is surely a financial profit.

What Is BAD About SEO: Black SEO Methods

You may ask: what is bad about SEO? Actually, its main principle is already bad. It is not good to interrupt in the process of showing the relevant results up just to make your website has a higher profit. This contradicts the justice of selection. However, in addition to this, there are a few “black SEO” methods, which are prohibited, but still often used.

Internal Content

• Some content writers try to add keywords in the invisible text. If the color of the font is close to the color of the background, as well as if the font size is 1 pixel, the keywords will be found by search engine, but not by a regular visitor. Luckily, such technique is now recognized by search engines and such websites get banned automatically. CSS is also banned as per competitor’s complaint.
• Doorways (completely irrelevant websites aimed at fraudulent activities) are also a way of the black SEO. This is aimed at typing errors of people trying to get to some popular websites.
• Cloaking – is showing a regular site for a common user and a special one for the robot responsible for indexation (this special copy has a lot of keywords and most likely no external links). User-Agent determines the robot and the regular visitor.
• Synonymization – this is copying of someone’s content changing every third word into its synonym to create an illusion of unicity. This method is out-of-date because the search engines are sensitive to synonyms now.
• Unique plagiarized content adding – is adding content to website, which is unique from the robot’s point of view, but actually is a soft copy of texts issued in paperback long ago. As a lot of people are being hired to scan books, we can predict the growth in usage of this method.

External Links

• Buying links of the hacked websites, which are sold by hackers.
• Adding links via vulnerabilities like XSS.
• Linkspamming: adding links to your resource in comments on blogs, in forums’ posts, etc.
• Spam with “invisible” links.
• Inserting a JavaScript code in the hidden frame or transferring on the target website (this is quite problematic, as the site should be hacked beforehand or in some way get an access to its CMS or static content).
• Organizing of fake-CDN, adding hidden frames to primitive websites.

Real-Life Harm of SEO

What is the harm of Search Engine Optimization in the real life? This is a modern term, so it hooks website owners, but it is actually selling the air. SEO specialists cannot be responsible for the outcome, even for the half of it, making the whole process pointless and not worth a penny. Here are some more issues caused by existence of SEO:

Teaching the SEO Principles

As we have already mentioned, SEO is not a science or discipline, as it is based on lame predictions and suppositions. The most you can get for your money – is the structured information from web sources. Remember the principle: who does not know how to do it, teaches to do it.

Getting Money for Those, Who Want to Get to the Top

SEO deals with a lot of money. There are sales of links and SEO services to purchase. Usually people pay to a certain SEO company for teaching how to raise the website’s position, but they are not aware of the fact, that the whole company consists of “people from the street,” who pretend they are doing something, and in case of failure blame the ever-changing algorithms of search engines.

Who Suffers from SEO?

Well, everyone except SEO specialists, who get an increasing profit.

Web Search Systems

They offer a paid context advertising, which is a legal way to raise position of a certain website. In this case, the search systems get money, not the unknown fraudsters. Also, too many irrelevant results on the top of list make customers use another web search engine. Search systems need to modify algorithms too often, and this is surely not free of cost.

Regular Users

The regular searchers may be tired of getting useless results while looking for information they need.

Internet Marketing Specialists

Obviously, banners and context advertising is more expensive and give result right away, but still a lot of people prefer paying less to get results cheaper and, as they suppose, for long. Thus, they prefer paying for air to SEO specialists instead of buying real help from specialists in the Internet Marketing.

Popular Bloggers

SEO users try to make their blogs more popular, leaving the really popular and useful blogs at the end of the list.

Web Developers

They are required to write a lot of unnecessary code, because their managers are convinced that this till place their website on the top for search engine results.

Conclusion

As you may see, the Internet and its popularization may even have inner negative issues, which get reflected on the offline world. However, due to the issues mentioned in this or previous articles we cannot tell that the Internet is completely a bad thing. Just all the things in the world have good and bad sides.