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I think there is a whole spectrum of making money online, from scamming/phishing and the like all the way to squeaky clean, not one bit optimized (SEO, conversi
by pierrefar 17y ago
I think there is a whole spectrum of making money online, from scamming/phishing and the like all the way to squeaky clean, not one bit optimized (SEO, conversions) shopping cart.
The debate is where you draw the line to define something as spam, and it also depends on your definition of spam. I mean, you can twist Google's business model and say it's scraping other people's content and plastering ads all over its pages. That sounds horribly close to a definition of spam and yet people love the search results from Google.
- yungchin 17y agoFor me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they don't come and bug me with it. For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write. It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.
- Psyonic 17y agoBut applying all that dark SEO is basically the point. Why else would a crappy $5 article written by an English-challenged Indian show up on the front page of any search result? It's all about gaming Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing. As has been described by others, since it's all about making ad-revenue, the article is SUPPOSED to be bad enough that they'll click on the ads to find what they are actually looking for.