What I've Learned Should Piss Me Off as a Marketer

I'm going to take a more educational look at the world with this post. Even though my opinions usually do society a greater service than any mere facts can claim to have done, it's my opinion that a fact or two here or there never made anybody any stupider.

There used to be this foul practice in online marketing (Search Engine Optimization in particular) called "spamdexing." One can spamdex in many ways, but the end result is always a really pissed off Google. If anybody reading this knows anything about pissing off Google, it's kind of like shooting a spitball at God (pardon my sacrilege). Google have the power to knock you down one or a thousand rankings (kind of like demotion), remove you from their index altogether (kind of like excommunication) and generally make your webpage the scourge of the universe if they so wish. Needless to say, I'm writing about spamdexing in order to portray it as an unethical tactic in leveraging the web for corporate (or personal) gain.

Before I continue, I should mention that I'm not the one who discovered this practice nor am I the one who discovered that Google cries and stomps its massive, powerful boot every time someone employs it these days. I am, however, a male college student. So, my ego will help me talk about it as if nobody in the world besides me knows what it is. Consider yourself lucky.

Spamdexing's most rudimentary form uses hidden text on a webpage as a form of keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an attempt at acheiving the highest level of keyword density (desired keywords on page divided by total words on page) possible. Press ctrl + A and read below this paragraph to see what I mean.

bean burrito delicious taco chalupa gastrointestinal malfunction

If I were a taco stand with internet access and a webpage, I might invisibly stuff my webpage with keywords like the ones above. The fact that I chose "bean burrito," "delicious taco," "chalupa," and "gastrointestinal malfunction" means that I want my site, I'll call it www.flacotaco.com, to appear at the top of Google's rankings when people type them in during a search. Of course, Google wouldn't like it, so they'd find ways to make my computer spontaneously explode and my family disown me, so I wouldn't want to engage in hidden text spamdexing.

I ran across this interesting article about BMW written by a guy from Google. It shows another (more complicated) way of gaming the search engines by using a redirecting landing page. Whoever started this practice thought it would outsmart Google, whose algorithm recognizes hidden keyword stuffing now.