A Dubious Search Engine Marketing Scheme

In search engine marketing, there are times when practitioners make use of search engine marketing tactics that are not necessarily in poor form but nonetheless toe the line of being questionable. There are guidelines that govern how search engine rankings should be driven up, but there are some search engine marketing practitioners who would not hesitate to find loopholes in the system and use these loopholes to their obvious advantage.

An interesting story that came up recently on the blogosphere is that of Matthew Inman, an employee of NextInternet.com. Inman was once the owner of a free online dating website which was suffering from low search engine rankings and had almost zero signups. He found a way to solve his dilemma by creating quiz badges that have links back to his homepage hidden within the HTML source code.

When these quiz badges found their way to various blogs and other social websites, as seemingly innocuous viral widgets would, the search engine ranking of his website, not to mention the traffic, began to soar. His idea was considered so ingenious that NextInternet.com thought it could use it for its own search engine marketing scheme. So, NextInternet.com bought Inman’s website and offered him a job of doing what he used to do with his old online dating site.

One recent search engine marketing ploy that Inman used to promote one of the websites of NextInternet.com is the Blog Readability Test. Just like his previous projects, Inman created a fun readability test and hid a link to cashadvance1500.com in the source code of the quiz badge that users got after completing the test. Again, just as viral widgets and well-made quizzes are apt to do, Blog Readability Test badge found its way to thousands of blogs and websites, including the Underwire blog maintained by Wired. The link to cashadvance1500.com is visible but can be easily overlooked.

This search engine marketing tactic certainly worked because it created a lot of links back to cashadvance1500.com and pushed the website’s search rankings up using the viral widget that Inman developed. But even if this tactic worked, can it be considered a straight way to go in search engine marketing?

Technically speaking, search engines like Google do not allow selling links to third parties through viral widgets in accordance with their quality guidelines. But since NextInternet.com owns cashadvance1500.com, it cannot be said that it is selling links through the Blog Readability Test badge. This is certainly a search engine marketing strategy that teeters on the dividing line between the good and the bad.

There are good tactics and there are bad tactics in search engine marketing. Sometimes, in order to push search engine rankings up and pull in traffic, search engine marketing practitioners use all the tricks they have in their sleeves to get the job done. There are tactics that cannot be called acceptable, but there are ploys that just toe the line. In the end, it is up to the search engine marketing practitioners to make the decision and to take the risks needed to do the job.

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