From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

Cheating at SEO

From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

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Cheating at SEO

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- You may wonder if there are shortcuts you can use to be successful with SEO, and there are certainly things that people can do. There are mechanisms that can build up links right away. There are mechanisms where people will generate thousands of pages of content and show it only to the search engine spider but not to the human visitor that sees them so that they can somehow maybe manipulate the algorithm. It's a mechanism called cloaking. When you go beyond the rules that the search engines have outlined and said that this is acceptable, you're no longer doing SEO, and what you're doing is referred to as spam or web spam. And well, you can be successful in the short-term with it. And if you really, really want to be diligent, maybe you can be successful from it in the long-term. Most people aren't. Most people find it's akin to trying to win a bicycle race that's going all over a marathon-long distance and you're trying to sprint. And then you've run out of energy and people pass you by. And you'll try to sprint again, but you just may not be able to keep up the pace because things change so much. It also can be very difficult if you're an established business. People who want to spam the search engines and go out there outright and do it generally are not worried that their website might get banned in the search engine and be wiped out. And that can happen, and then maybe they move on to some other disposable website. But if you're a regular business, you probably do not have that luxury. So you really need to be in it for the long-term. And that means you really shouldn't be spamming the search engines.

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