Unethical SEO – do we really have a chance?

I decided to bust out Yahoo Site Explorer to check out the competition when it comes to the search term ‘web design’ in major search engines, Google, Bing etc.

What I found was very shocking indeed.  It seems methods of blackhat SEO are still ruling the roost when it comes to that all important first page search result (SERP).  Search engine optimisation should be an organic process where websites link to each other based on the quality of content alone.  This sounds great on paper….

In reality this trust based on inbound links to increase the popularity of websites is heavily abused.  Companies ranking on the first page of Google for the web design search term have all taken part in what can only be described as unethical spamming of the Internet to force links towards their website, to fool search engines into giving them higher SERP’s.

The abuse ranges from link spam to manipulative page widgets, there really is a shocking amount of underhand tactics being used.

Blog Comment Spam

This has to be the most common form of attack.  What this means is a bot (computer script) sends out 1000′s of blog comments hoping the blog owners believes them to be real and approves the comment.  The comment is filled with links back to the website the spammer wants to build page rank and search engine results for.

What does this mean for us?

What all this is saying to me is – Its impossible to attain organic high level search engine results.  That may sound pretty defeatist, but unless you happen to come across an SEO miracle or create something so viral people link to your site en mass its going to be practically impossible to fight the spammers.  Its not a level playing field, and increasing the size of your budget directly dictates how high your site appears in those fabled search engine result pages.  The Internet is supposed to be a free market place, where information is held above all else.  However its increasingly being abuse, and its left to companies like Google and Bing to try and clean up the mess.