Search Engine Spam &
The Forgotten Stakeholders

I'd argue that once you start looking at abusive search marketing - spam - such grouping risks disenfranchising certain stakeholders in some situations.

In any given spam incident, if all interests are to recognized, I propose six groups:

1. The owner / manager / production team of the 'spamming' website.

2. The SEO, advising and / or acting for the spamming site.

3. The search engine(s)

4. Competitor sites / other site owners.

5. The searcher / customer

6. The Internet

Please note: in some cases, 1 and 2 may be the same person; this article will consider the 'roles' rather than necessarily 'the individual persons'

Let's examine these roles a little more closely. I apologise for the obviousness of what follows, but it is important to set the scene.

1. The website owner wants to maximise the return on investment, and probably understands that this requires maximizing visitor numbers, though the finer points of targetting visitors may or may not be fully understood.
   
   
2. The SEO, advising the owner, understands that to realise those legitimate aims, the site will need to to be optimized for search engine engines, and has a range of options available, both on-site and off-site. The SEO will be aware of search engine guidelines, though may not like them or agree with them. Being a paid-for expert, the owner will probably depend on the SEO's views and advice, even if that advice is not fully understood; the SEO may or may not have a clear understanding about what measures are acceptable to the client. Either way, the SEO in this scenario is the expert in the field, and the fees will likely be related in some way to the SEO's ability to meet pre-agreed targets or general aims where serps, ranking or ROI are concerned.
   
   
3. The Search Engine(s) exist to provide their users with information being sought; in a perfect world, SEs would be psychic, and deliver exactly what the user wanted, not the user thought was wanted or said was wanted. In practice, SEs do a remarkable job to provide anything useful from the billions of pages out there, and they spend billions in software, hardware and human brains to constantly refine and improve their delivery.
   
   But I think most would agree "they don't always get it right", with varying emphasis. Significantly, SEs do not work for websites, even their sponsors - though there are quite legitimate discussions about what SEs do and for whom; but this article is NOT about search engine ethics in any way shape or form; that's for another day.
   
   Search engines are not uninterested in search results; they exist to provide "the best", whatever they consider that to be, but they are [/i]disinterested[/i] - that is, they have no interest in whether the results of a particular search come out as 1,2,3 or 3,2,1 - once the algorithm is running, the SEs job is then to monitor results and tweak or rebuild with the ambitious aim of anticipating future users' wishes. No easy task.
   
   
4. The act of spam affects the position in the serps of the spamming site; it must also, therefore, affect the position of other sites, as a direct result.
   
   
5. The searcher; SE user, potential visitor, potential customer, seeker after knowledge is a stakeholder in that they have chosen to use THIS search engine at THIS time, entering THIS search term (or terms). In almost every case, the searcher has no way of assessing which sites 'have a right' to be placed above or below other sites. But they will know if, as a result of spamming, their results contain duplicates, irrelevant pages, forwarding pages or garbage pages.
   
   
6. The Internet as a whole suffers if information is downgraded, linkage is flawed, and users fail to achieve their legitimate aims; one spam event, of course will have no discernable effect; billions will have a cumulative effect - just as a single email spam matters not - but the totality is a major distraction, annoyance and expense.

Let us now consider two possible scenarios involving domain.com.

In scenario A, an honest and well-meaning SEO has delivered his best, but for whatever reason, domain.com appears at #487 in a search for key words.

For the record, those reasons may include poor content, maybe poor on-site optimization, poor linking policy, powerful competition in a highly commercialized area, or simply too soon to expect a better result from the SEO's development so far. But for the purposes of this article, it doesn't matter, the site languishes at #487.

The top ten of the serps looks like this:

1. site1.net
2. site2.net
3. site3.net
4. site4.net
5. site5.net
6. site6.net
7. site7.net
8. site8.net
9. site9.net
10. site10.net

In scenario B, the SEO has proposed using a spamming technique, depracated by the SEs, to elevate the site onto the front page of the serps; no matter the views and motivation of the owner; for our purposes, the SEO has made the recommendation, and site owner has gone along with it.

In reality, there are big issues of whether the owner knew, cared, understood; I am leaving them for another day. The owner either is the SEO, or has authorised spamming at the SEO suggestion.

We'll assume the spam technique was successful (spam often is in the short term); the stuff served to the search engines was not the same as that served to human beings (we are not troubled here by how it was achieved - other than it was a spamming technique, 'outlawed' by the search engines.

The top ten of the serps looks like this:

1. site1.net
2. site2.net
3. site3.net
4. site4.net
5. domain.com
6. site5.net
7. site6.net
8. site7.net
9. site8.net
10. site9.net

Now, how does this affect our stakeholders?

1. The owner - A very significant difference. His site appears at #5, whereas without spamming it would have appeared at #487
   
   
2. The SEO - A very significant difference. Without reviewing linking, content, design or any other factor, the work appears to be an unqualified success.
   
   
3. The search engine(s) - A very significant difference; there is a greater than 50% chance that site #487 is visibly unsuited to the top ten, being either less relevant, garbage, empty, forwarding or duplicate. An unhappy searcher is more likely to change their SE preference, particularly if this is a frequent event.
   
   
4. Other site owners - A small but significant difference, to each site below #5. Each displaced site is a little less likely to be visited; each site is a little less likely to do business. The effect in one search is small but demonstrable - the effect after many searches could be catastrophic.
   
   
5. The searcher / customer - A small but significant difference. The user will be unaware that site #5 was not found by the SE algo alone, and will not be aware that sites #6 thru #10 have all slipped a place - or that site10.net has fallen out of the top ten (and others have, of course, fallen off the page, etc.). But they will be aware in the many cases that the spam site is visibly 'wrong' (see paragraph 3, above)
   
   
6. The Internet - One more snip in a death by a billion cuts. The analogy with spam emails applies.

The point of this article is to focus on the other sites affected by spammers - they will often tell the lie that their work'increases relevancy, but they will never discuss the damage done to other sites. Though, of course, they are first to complain about the SEs when someone does it to them.

Spam is not a victimless act. There are consequences.

Published: 04 August 2005
This article may be published elswhere, provided this footnote is included as is,
with a live link for the source: http://www.seo2seo.com/articles/
Copyright © 2005 Andrew Heenan. Comments very welcome.

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