The internet offers a huge amount of benefits to those who wish to
take the time to build a business or offer something creative to share
with the rest of the world.
The qualities about online businesses which attracts the most people
is the flexibility of lifestyle and the prospect of making a very good
living because of the huge global exposure and reach which you
potentially have by being connected online.
Unfortunately due to this wide potential market base there will
always be those who will try to exploit this in ways considered to be
unethical. I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise because unethical
business practices happen all the time and have been happening since man
first started to trade in ancient times.
The only difference is, now with the interconnectedness of the world
wide web and the huge internet technological advancements, the unethical
side of business and marketing has been magnified.
For instance before the internet really started to take off in the
late nineties, people were hardly ever confronted with ads, spam or junk
mail about “acai berries” or “penis enlargement”. I mean when was the
last time you got a flyer in your regular letterbox about “Adding 3
inches” to your you-know-what?
The peculiarity of today’s internet marketing is solely due to the
nature of the technology itself and for all of the advantages and
benefits the internet has brought us, the same advantages and benefits
are unfortunately exploitable for those intent on using unethical means.
There are probably a few qualities about the online environment which
are unique to it compared to other mediums and which therefore make the
unethical marketing seem so much more pronounced.
For instance we already mentioned the grand scale of reach which
people have when using the internet. You could potentially spam millions
of people daily on the internet with little or no cost to you, whereas
doing the same thing using snail mail would take you years and probably
send you broke.
Also, the faceless nature of the internet makes it seem easier for
people to fall into unethical practices because they don’t ever have to
face the people they’re trying to scam.
The current global economic turmoil and job uncertainty is no doubt
also playing a role in increasing peoples’ fear and desperation and so
some are willing to try anything to make a few extra bucks.
But in the long haul you will find those trying to cheat the system
and other people, eventually get found out and their money-making
strategies come crashing down. Quite often these same types of people
quickly try to think up new schemes and the process starts all over
again.
The point is that from the perspective of building a stable income
online, unethical schemes and scams are definitely not the way to go.
I know it’s a cliche but it’s also very true when people say: “If
something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t”. This cliche
has never been more apt than what has been happening on the internet now
for over a decade.
Google and How It’s Leveling the Playing Field
Google is by far the most popular search engine, taking something
like over 80% of the internet search pie followed by Bing and Yahoo who
share less than 10% each (according to 2011/2012 statistics).
You may also probably know that Google is a huge business globally,
making most of its money either directly or indirectly from search
activities. Therefore as the biggest search engine provider, Google is
also most exposed to the unethical activities of people trying to cheat
the system. Due to this exposure, they are also constantly tweaking and
refining their search engines to combat the low quality, low value, high
spam sites being displayed in their search results.
The latest announcement by Google’s Matt Cutts (who is the head of
the Webspam team) was that they are increasingly targeting sites which
are “over-optimized” – meaning those sites which might have an
overabundance of unnatural backlinks and stuffed with keywords which
make them almost unreadable and uninformative.
After all it’s in Google’s and everybody else’s interest that they
provide a quality service to its clients by way of offering relevant
search results. This means reducing the number of bounces caused by
sites which are low quality and spammy in nature.
The way Google usually targets low quality spammy sites is that it
gives them a lower weighting and ranking in the search results. The
effect of this is that such sites are demoted from say the top one
hundred search results to something further down the rankings.
Changes in Google’s core search algorithm and rankings methods
shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider that Google apparently
make hundreds of code and algorithm modifications per year. But what is
becoming more and more surprising is the increasing intelligence being
built into the Google algorithms which are making them smarter in
identifying a “good” versus a “bad” site.
So what does this have to do with you and your online ambitions?
Quite simply, if you dedicate your time and work smart to offer
quality products/services/information to people and in doing so you also
instill ethical practices in your online business ventures, then you
will more likely reap the rewards from your hard work; quite often
simply from the benefits gained from Google’s smarter search algorithm.
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