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 Spammers like to
throw up a smokescreen to pretend there is no answer to one simple question: What is search spam?
Fortunately a simple answer exists... spamming is doing something to deceive a search engine. That is the definition on
Google's spam reporting page. Search engine optimization is NOT spamming, although you can optimize spam pages.
Other ways to put it:
"A webpage is spam if it or a portion of it was created with the purpose of increasing its ranking through use of
content that does not add to the user experience."
"Spamming refers to actions intended to mislead search engines and give some pages higher ranking than they deserve."
"Spam is any deliberate human action that is meant to trigger an unjustifiably favorable relevance or importance for
some web page, considering the page's true value."
"All actions intended to boost ranking, without improving the true value of a page, are considered spamming."
Spamming is the intention to trick a search engine into thinking a sow's ear is made of silk. Spammers basically just
flip off the search engines and say, "I intend to lie and trick you any chance I get."
For the most part, spam pages are garbage. It is possible to spam to benefit mediocre or even excellent pages, but in the
poker industry this is fairly rare. For the most part in the poker search world, the lines are clearly drawn between the
solid content sites that people want to go to (both information sites and cardrooms), and spammers with either poor quality
material or literally none at all. The most popular poker spam tactic is to create "pages" that literally do nothing
but redirect to cardroom sites with affiliate tags. This makes spammers the "enemies" of both true content sites and
cardrooms too. A cardroom neither wants to pay somebody for simply redirecting traffic from a typo domain, nor do they want to
risk getting a penalty from a search engine. One such penalty inflicted on Party Poker cost them over $100,000,000.
The poker world is largely dominated by "white hats" -- non-spammers. However, there is so much money in the poker
industry that "black hats" (spammers) can make a relatively large amount of money, so there is probably more Texas
Holdem and poker spam than anything else online. It's an interesting dichotomy -- the largest poker sites make hundreds
of millions of dollars a year, while many poker spammers would consider themselves very successful to have made $100,000
in a year. Some spammers try to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, while major poker sites risk losing hundreds of
MILLIONS if they get hit with a spam penalty... and somehow these two types battle for the exact same search turf.
There are different types of search spammers. Some are content thieves and site hackers. Others simply don't see a
reason to follow rules made by search engines, similar to how an offensive lineman might hold a defensive lineman in a
football game because the point is to win the game, not follow the rules. These are two very different types of people,
but the bottom line they share (usually) is a lack of quality content that can't "win" on its own.
As stated elsewhere on this site, my own philosophy of search marketing is to make the best content on a topic, and
work to make a search engine genuinely recognize it as the best. This "do it right" SEO is alien to people
who want a quick buck and could not care less what they do to get it, from spamming blogs to stealing candy from a baby.
But besides being the most satisfying path for creative people, "doing it right by doing it the best" also happens
to be the most profitable path in the poker world. |
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