SEO MADNESS: Ch. 1 SE Conspiracy? FAKE WEBS!
By John Henry Architect, www.dreamhomedesignusa.com
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Have you been noticing lately that the ‘frontrunners’ in your business have been buying ads on Google, Bing or Yahoo? These are the first listings you normally see using similar search terms as those on your web. These keywords are paid for, and very dearly so. Now why would that be? It could be because these frontrunners have money to burn (since they are so successful) to keep in front of their competition -- or something else is going on. It is more likely that their organically set up or technically correct webs are not drawing as many hits/inquiries/conversions as they think they should be getting!
The fact is that internet websites are being added daily on an – I think – unmanageable rate. Not only are legitimate businesses pushing out multiple websites in desperation (because they see their online inquiries waning or are dead in the water) but now there are bogus sites out there who see an opportunity to make money out of other (legitimate web) content and capitalizing on it by appropriating images and other written information and sort of ‘shake and baking’ it all into a completely pirated web while running ads all over it.
This surging phenomenon weakens legitimate businesses and waters down the entire internet. So now your honest site must compete with thousands of other cybercriminals pushing pirated content to make their offerings as good as yours. You have seen these webs: a seemingly proper named web with multiple paragraphs that make no sense with photographs stolen from other websites. Ads running up, across, down and everywhere.
What these cheaters are doing is publishing catch words and high value search terms onto a sort of make believe website. This content and especially stolen images show up in searches for ‘luxury homes for sale’ and ‘Houston real estate for sale’, etc. keywords that honest businesses are using.
So millions of fake webs are ruining the good webs (and honest businesses) by drawing away people who are truly interested in finding you and contracting for your services! What can you do? I considered engaging an attorney to write letters to the owners of these fake webs and threaten copyright and intellectual property theft. But when I would try to find the phone numbers, email addresses or mailing addresses, most had none. Even inquiry forms didn’t work. These things are like whack-a-moles. They may go down or disappear but three take their place. And they multiply. Endlessly.
The Big Three search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – say they work on algorithms to search out and flag these bogus webs. But they aren’t doing their job very well. In fact, I think, they are happy for this because good people are frustrated as they see their traffic drop constantly and find that the only recourse is to… buy ads from the search engine companies to stay on top! This is an insane road that is bankrupting especially the small business while making Google, Bing and Yahoo the billions and billions of dollars their business model relies on! People: this is a conspiracy to rob us of our livelihoods – at least diminishing potential leads generated from legitimately designed and operating internet websites.
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