techniques, right or wrong ?

I've read now a lot about SEO and all the "good" and "bad" things you can do but daily surfing and searching with google makes me wonder, because I often find pages in the TOP10 using all the bad techniques we're so afraid of.

I've found pages using server-farming, keyword-spamming, invisible text.


How could this be, if all of these techniques are considered bad ???


Is the reason for all the writing about the "right way" only to open a new market for "SEO specialists" and to make some extra money ??

Right now, I'm really unsure about all this stuff !!!
Please make me believe in it again !!!!

Of course the "bad stuff" works, otherwise no one would do it.

But in the end, you will have long-term success but doing the "good stuff". The "bad stuff" will work faster, but in the end will fail.

(I'm not a SEO consultant, so I'm not trying to sell my services).

- Shawn

A high google ranking can bring you a lot of dough on a popular search term. You can also get a lot of dough by getting high rankings on many minor terms. With this at stake there will be lots of people throwing any trick that they can think of onto their pages.

At any given time you can find spammy pages near the top of the google SERPs... but that doesn't mean that folks at google are doing nothing. They care about their SERPS and constantly tweak their algo to discriminate against spammy sites.

Lots of sites have been banned for hidden text, duplicate content and keyword stuffing. But new sites of this type pop up all of the time and sites trying yet some other manipulative technique are always being lauched too.

We see these sites in the SERPs and complain about them, but if google was doing nothing about them they would dominate topSERPs on just about every search term.

I think that we will always see spammy sites sneaking through the system or being present before they are detected by the google spam algo. But, over time many techniques will result in a rapid boot from the SERPs.