Yes, all scams are bad. But some are more intelligent than others.
I’m not an optimizer of the search engines, but here is my assessment of the apparent system hustle…

I subscribe to Google Alerts.
Based on the keywords I select, Google peruses the interwebs and provides me an e-mail of sites or posts that contain those key words.

In a recent Google Alert, I received a link to a LiveJournal page.
I visited the page only to find that the content was nothing more than my keywords repeated over and over.
After some clicking about, I realized that each posting was dedicated to repeating various words or phrases. Trickery!

The site has banner ads. Presumably paid per click.
While I didn’t click on the ad, the idea of someone making money off my frustration annoys me.
Yet it’s brill at the same time.

I won’t provide a link to this site because I don’t want their traffic to increase.
Any similar experiences? How common is digital bait and switch?

Tags: bait and switch, google alerts, LiveJournal, marketing, scheme, seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Superior Judgment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.