Link Spamming: The SEO Money Pit

Link spamming is one of the shadier ways to improve ranking in search engines, and while it may look appealing because of it's quick gains, the effects last only as long as you're willing to pay and have no lasting impact on true website popularity/relevance.

I'm writing this because (as those who follow search engine optimisation will know)  Google is expected to update it's tech in the next few weeks/months. And we can expect a lot of the quick and dirty package SEO products out there to become markedly less effective as a result.

Pretty much all SEO can broken down into 4 types of activity:

1) Making the site search-engine friendly.

2) Relevance optimisation. Getting publicly recognised content.

3) Generating traffic by referrals or advertising.

4) "Black Hat" link spamming and audience buying.

The fourth of these activities has one distinguishing feature from all the others:

IT DOESN"T LAST

Everything else you do to improve your sites ranking builds actual relevance, but link spamming is false success. Even if you pay for that kind of service and it works you're not improving you're actual position, and when Google comes along with an update to detect the current generation of link spamming/ false traffic strategies your ranking drops.

SEO is something you never get to stop doing if you want to grow your web business. However if it's done right, then each month you get to build on what you've done before and maintenance will always be less expensive than growth.

SEO done wrong however, with link spamming stops working the instant you stop doing it or Google updates it's ranking algorithms with a little more smarts.

I've seen companies pay thousands a month for SEO services and the instant they stop their site falls into total obscurity because it was being artificially buoyed up. Nothing was done to actually improve their search engine ranking they were paying for the position every month.

I've seen others spend half as much. They grow slower but their traffic is real, the links are valid and the audience is genuine, when they take a break the users still find them and still want their product.

Genuine SEO is an investment in the position of your business - link spamming is a tax on people who dont realise that being at the top of the search results and getting lots of traffic is of no use if most of the people who and click on your link had no genuine interest in seeing your site.