Gaming the system: welcome to the world of the adipose hankie

Until I tried to write for the Internet, I was living in a very sheltered world. A world where you wrote solely in order to communicate something, however trivial, that was of value to the reader. Whether it was a 1,000 page novel or a note for the milkman, that didn’t matter - the aim was to impart a message to one or more human beings.

Things changed when I began writing online. My first foray into Internet writing was via HubPages back in 2009. As you can see I’m still here, and have branched out onto a similar site called Wizzley, plus a couple of my own self-hosted blogs/sites and freelance writing gigs through Elance.

Those three years have taught me a lot. Most of it has been good, but some of it hasn’t. For from the sidelines during the past two years or so, I have observed the darker arts of the SEO profession and what they mean for the craft of writing.

In case you didn’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Its aim is to get your site or blog “noticed” by the search engines, so that when somebody searches using Google (or whatever), the site that’s “optimised” appears at or near the top of the SERPs (that’s Search Engine Results Pages to the uninitiated).

SEO specialists can use a number of techniques for their clients’ (or their own) sites. Some of these techniques are harmless, and won’t be noticed by the reader. But some are bizarre, and that’s the charitable way of putting it.

A cornerstone of SEO is the use of keywords. Some keywords have a high “click value” - if you run an advertising network like Adsense on a page where you have a high value keyword, the site owner will get more money per click than if they’d used a lower paying keyword. In addition, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more likely that page will be found by the searcher. So if my keyword was “cat litter” then a typical passage on my page might go like this:

"I use cat litter for my cats’ cat litter trays. Cat litter is great. You can get all sorts of cat litter - wood chip cat litter, Fuller’s earth cat litter, and even cat litter made from pellets of recycled newspaper. To use cat litter, you need cat litter trays and a cat litter scoop."

Rather a lot of cat litter for such a small piece of text, isn’t it? This is known in the trade as keyword stuffing and it can make things a little, er… stilted. To say the least. And just to ram the message home just that little bit further, many SEO specialists opt to make the keyword bold. Not to benefit the reader, you understand, but to make the search engines sit up and take notice.

Another thing apart from keywords that sends a page up the SERPs is the presence of plenty of backlinks. Backlinks are links within other pages on other sites that “point” to your page. Generally speaking - with caveats - the more backlinks the better. Which is where article spinning comes in. Basically, one real English article written by a real human being is “spun” by a piece of software multiple times, producing a clutch of offspring written in… well, it might be English Jim, but not as we know it. The software works by taking words or phrases and generating synonyms. Sometimes this works OK, but sometimes the results are unintentionally hilarious. Thus “fatty tissue” becomes “adipose hankie” and “full body massage” becomes “whole corpse rubbing”. Imagine an entire Internet littered with spun articles of this kind, and you begin to understand why some SEO practices give the profession a bad name.

© Empress Felicity December 2011