Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO has helped hundreds of thousands of websites become easily accessible and profitable, but the practice has a dark side. SEO is killing the internet, making it less and less useful everyday.
SEO is the process of making a site more search engine friendly by following W3C standards for coding, strategically using keywords that users are searching for and promoting sites using backlinks. Many sites use these practices responsibly, but a growing number of website owners use it to cheat the system and make a quick buck.
To make things clear, I am not dissing SEO entirley, or webmasters who use SEO to make their sites easier to find in search engines. I am talking about the people who create dozens of landing pages, use keyword stuffing, and try to exploit the system without providing useful content to the user.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of websites out there that ping RSS feeds from blogs and provide a link and excerpt to the original entry and stuff the pages full of Google Adsense ads or other forms of advertising. The site itself really contains no useful content, or any original content. The sole purpose of these sites is to make a quick buck while doing as little work as possible. These kind of sites delude search results with a bunch of of nothing, and often times these SEO spam sites rank higher than the actual content you were looking for. Some of these sites go so far that they actually steal your entire article (and sometimes they add some keyword spam to it) and call it their blog. Great… now we have twenty sites with the same article on it. What good does that do anyone?
Another big problem with SEO is landing pages. Since the dawn of the internet when has a landing page actually been found to be useful? Probably never. Landing pages are designed to rank high in search engines and lead the user to buy something. Sounds harmless, right? A real landing page, aka your index page should do the job. SEO landing pages are designed for the sole purpose to manipulate search results. These are the kind of landing pages that are ruining the internet. Often times SEO spammers will create dozens of these for a single site, all with minor changes such as a city name or keywords. These landing pages then flood the top search spots, leaving more useful results, i.e. the ones that take you to a real website, in the dust.
SEO spammers are killing the internet one crappy landing page at a time by degrading the usefulness of search results. Search engines are our portal to the internet, akin to the store directory in a large mall. The goal of search engines is to bring us quickly to the content we are looking for. When SEO spammers start altering search results, it makes it harder for the end user to find the content they are looking for, therefore making search engines and the internet less useful.
Remember my friends, optimize responsibility.