Search Marketing and Spam

Marketing budgets for online search marketing is steadily rising. Businesses and their marketing departments are very aware of the importance of promoting their brand and products online. And, since the majority of buyers use online search engines to learn about products and to buy products, this particular means of reaching customers is quickly becoming a necessity . . . a mainstay.

In an April 2006 article posted at SearchEngineWatch.com, the two basic reasons why search marketing works was brought to light:

1. “Search delivers the specific, relevant information consumers are looking for—just when they need it.”1

2. Search provides proven results. And, “a positive ROI (if you do it right!).1

These are two powerful reasons for businesses to make haste in upping their search marketing budgets. And, the information available clearly shows that search marketing is effective for big ticket items such as cars to small items such as allergy symptom relief products.

It should be noted here that there are two different strategies for search marketing:

1. The first provides a link to a landing page that is primarily advertisement - possibly a very long copywritten ad, or maybe unreliable and unrelated content, but no real substance for the visitor (consumer).

2. The second strategy is organic SEO. This utilizes inbound marketing strategies. The business/marketer provides information in the form of content (posts or articles) that is valuable to the visitor. This informational content creates a trust: the visitor appreciates and values the provided data.

And, no matter which of the search marketing strategies is used, they both rely on keywords. A keyword is a word or group of words that target specific searchers. For example, if a consumer is looking for a quality air cleaner because he suffers from allergies, he may enter “air cleaner,” or “allergy cleaner” as his keyword.

If the marketer has done his work, his company’s url will be visible in the search engine, and the consumer may very well click on his link.

In a perfect world, this would be a perfect system; those sites who put time and effort into providing valuable information would lead the pack. But, unfortunately, there are marketers who use a number of varying keywords to lure the consumer to a number of different landing pages, all of which are to sell their products. Or, they may use another form of link manipulation, thereby diluting the system with spam.

How Does Spam Effect Search Marketing?

Some words are easy targets for spammers; based on statistics gathered by keyword search tools, a marketer can find keywords that will drive specific targeted traffic to his sites.

While there are some restrictions on the use of keywords, spamming and SEO, many spammers slip through the cracks. For example, paid links violate Google’s guidelines, but this doesn’t stop many of spammers - some sites pay a host of bloggers to link to them using anchor text. Often, in this scenario the linking blogs are unrelated to the target site, the brief content is of poor quality, or they are spam sites themselves.

While search engines such as Google should be clamping down on this type of behavior, lately they are not. Could it be spamming is just too prevalent?

Why Does Search Marketing Spam Matter?

Spamming is cheating, pure and simple. This practice not only affects the hard working honest marketer, it hurts the consumers looking for quality information, and it will ultimately hurt the search engines that allow it.

By spamming, companies can get high rankings in the search engines. This means their link will be one of the first a consumer will see when he types in a corresponding keyword. That link may lead the consumer to a pure promo landing page (often used by affiliate marketers), or maybe to a site with content produced by content mills. Either way, the consumer gets the short end of the stick, as does the legitimate marketer.