blogcircle.net

Join the community on Facebook

The Dark Side of SEO

Never mind the recently created parent company ALPHABET which encompasses Google – Google itself is responsible for the creation of so many jobs, careers and income opportunities beyond those which they offer themselves directly. One industry which may even been bigger than Google itself is SEO, Search Engine Optimization, which basically entails a service which what is usually an SEO agency renders through which they engage in some strategic content creation practices to try and rank their clients high in the search results.

We’re talking about Google here as a specific search engine in our case study because I mean let’s face it, how many people actually use Bing or Yahoo to search for anything really? You’d probably come into contact with Bing if you used the default system browser Microsoft provides (probably to download another browser, like Chrome) and you’d be forgiven for wondering if Yahoo is even still a search engine at all, given its rather busy homepage. Believe it or not, those aren’t the only search engines in existence though, there are many others which are still around, trying to fight for the scraps left over by the giant, Google.

Anyway, getting back to the colossal industry which is SEO, I’m not going to get into great detail about exactly what SEO agencies do in order to get their clients’ websites ranked high, but what I want to discuss is the dark side of this practice, which is the effects of the list of the highest ranking websites as a result.

When was the last time you ran a Google search and then got exactly what you were looking for as the first result? It’s probably never happened and I’m probably being ambitious here. You can go through the entire first page of results and still not get what you’re looking for. Either that or the information you get is pretty much incomplete, misleading or intentionally designed to keep you on something of a wild goose chase. Ultimately someone is trying to sell you something, whether through a direct offer which essentially promises to give you more complete info than that which you’ve managed to get so far, or the sale is more of an indirect one with some ads around the content pitching you something for sale.

This is indeed the dark side of SEO, where the results you essentially get first aren’t necessarily the best, but rather those which have been optimized to rank high on the search engine. This is why you end up wasting hours upon hours of your time online, compounded by the myriad of sidetracking info and content as well.

Fortunately there is some content which can never be published by imposters, such as how I can very quickly find personal injury legal services such as those offered by Quirk Law Firm without having to worry about being led on an info-seeking wild goose chase. The rule of thumb, I think is to make your searches as locally targeted as possible, and if you’re just seeking pure info then you should visit specific websites dealing with the publication of specialist topics, such as science or university journal sites.