The dark side
Sounds like a possible script for George Lucas/Disney production! Unfortunately the dark side of SEO is the real world of internet marketing. SEO has its sith-lord called the search engine being used for illicit gains. So, what is the dark side of SEO?
- Basically, anyone with know how can destroy the rankings of another business without even physically touching their site. And this is happening a lot more than the masters of search engines care to admit. Imagine a florist who is ranked #3 for certain products. If they are nasty they could employ someone to sabotage the rankings of the top two. It would cost only a hundred dollars or so. This insane state of the industry has come about due to spammers and individuals trying to rig the system to their advantage. They have forced search engines to react in such a way, which penalize the good.
- Google is broken. Most SEO’s love google because they make big money from them, but at the top of the SEO tree are colleagues who see Google has gone astray and is leading the industry down a dark and dangerous path. Why? Firstly because they favour brands so much, and secondly because of the way they’ve reacted to spammers and abusers of the system. An analogy is 911. Afterwards 911 what happened to all the good guys like us? We had to ensure fewer freedoms, more restrictions, hassled air travel, etc, etc…just because a few terrorists made trouble. In many ways the terrorists won due to the fear they instilled and increased control by government. Google is the same as our Government (well the internet version), the fight with the bad guys (spammers) is causing it to favour the big brands…which coincidently can spam and do many illegal SEO practices with almost no retribution. But if a small guy gets nailed by a bad guy or mistakenly does something wrong, the small guy gets taken out of all search results which essentially sends them bankrupt. What’s the big deal you may say, well….the internet is mostly made up of small good guys like you and I; not people from the dark side and certainly not the big brands.
What does all this mean to you in a practical way? Well, firstly its more difficult to do SEO hence higher cost, big players dominate search rankings leaving crumbs for the rest, you must be very careful who your friends are and now some transparency has been lost as sites have to watch their back. Throughout history many conquerors have risen but always fall due to abusing their power or simply dying off. Companies are no different, when they no longer function correctly the market is ripe for competitors; hence in the increasing rise of other search engines. From a quality prospective Google still delivers better results that the others but its only a matter of time before they catch up.
A little history (the dark side of humanity)
We could easily go back to the era of Fred and Wilma Flintstone, but lets start from around 1215 or so when the Manga Carta started doing its journey. At that time the concept of free man or man of the land started to form. Simple laws were introduced, and of course man being man, took advantage of those laws or using the side or back doors.
After that, governments started to pass legislation to close loopholes and more clearly define the essence of freedom, all because society was not elevated enough to handle responsibility, due mostly to greed of some thought.
The rest is history, we now have a government that controls the people instead of working for the people.
Now what has this all got to do with search engines you ask? Everything is the answer!
The reason search engines are broken and are going down the wrong path is because humanity has not changed, it still has an element of greed that will take advantage of any loopholes. That is why search engines have such complicated algorithms and why constant change is needed to enforce more control to weed out abusers, in an ever downward spiral of more control and dysfunctional governance. We the people are to blame, well, maybe not all of us; but the general consciousness of the people is not so crash hot!
SEO black-hole
Do you know what a galactic black hole is? Suppose to be the ultimate garbage collector. Search engines have a black-hole within them called being kicked off the index. If a site is banned for spamming or using some method to fool the search engine and gain an advantage over the market, it goes into the SEO black-hole trash can.
To avoid this, a slow and natural form of web design and optimisation is required, otherwise you may also fall into the trap set for abusers.