Other kids had lemonade stands. My “twin cousin” and I — at 8 years old both budding ambitious (not to mention shady) businesspeople — opened a laundry stand on the sidewalk in his upscale Los Alimitos neighborhood one summer. We thought we were very shrewd because we collected trusting neighbors’ laundry, and rather than wash it, we simply spritzed it with Febreze (or whatever the the ’80′s version of Febreze was). In no time at all, laundry was finished, folded, and returned to glowing customers who raved about how fresh their laundry smelled. We laughed all the way to our piggy banks.
The next morning none of our customers returned. Looking back, I believe that they probably realized the impossibility of laundry being washed and dried in 20 minutes and were simply indulging us for a day. But nevertheless we realized that our business model (cheating) had short-lived success. What would we do next? It wasn’t likely we’d be able to be as beguiling with a lemonade stand. Perhaps we could secretly make Crystal Light and sell it as bona fide lemonade, but of course that would be just as much work, so what was the point?
That was the beginning and the end of my unethical business practices. Unfortunately, in the SEO world, like anywhere else, there are still some 8-year-old laundry stand kids masquerading as professionals, practicing “Febreze” techniques and guaranteeing first-page results. Their tactics sometimes work–until Google catches on and blacklists the websites that have implemented their changes. These SEO’ers take shortcuts like placing unrelated keywords (like Paris Hilton) in their meta tags, alt text, or CSS layers. They stack keywords (like cheese cheese cheese cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese) to fake out search engines. They sardine-stuff sentences (sentences at their loosest definition) in alt text, or hide keywords in the content of the page–keywords so tiny and faint that you’d need your 5.75 power reading glasses to make them out. The list goes on and on: bait-and-switch spam, redirects, doorway pages, cloaking, cybersquatting, and more.
Fixing the devastating effects the above practices can have is time-consuming and expensive. Once a customer’s website disappears from the search engines for having been caught cheating, it’s unlikely these charlatan SEO’ers are going to get a lot of customer loyalty. So it’s on to the next block, to prey on some other unassuming website owner. But once word gets around, the game is up.
Of course, there’s always selling lemonade.
