SEO
It seems like lately the talk of almost every site I come across is in regards to SEO. There are various job postings on sites like craigslist, e-lance, and other classifieds websites that will pay for someone very knowledgeable in search engine optimization. Analyzing the information in the content regarding search engine optimization is usually the same just reworded differently. Most teach you the most obvious such as Meta tagging, url naming, etc. Due to the nature of how SEO works with offsite optimization, I have also realized that there are plenty of junk pages floating around the internet specifically key worded, and linked back to large sites (I won’t name any but you know who you are) in order to create link backs and what not to increase their ranking in the search results.
This type of spamming or junk content at times may sometimes appear as top search results on certain keywords, and therefore sometimes alarming or distracting the user into clicking through the link only to be disappointed with the results. You see small companies spamming digg.com, blogger, wordpress, and any other site they can tap into and they throw almost any type of irrelevant content on to those sites, but just enough to make it seem like a valid website. Google then indexes these sites and picks up the keywords used and links to the main company site or a branch of the main site therefore increasing page rank, search result placement, etc of the company’s website.
This is becoming a small epidemic, when using blog search tools or directories you will come across many of these obvious offsite SEO Spam purposed sites and now have to filter through them to find relevant blogs or sites. Unfortunately there is no easy solution to filter through this type of optimization. This method is one of the most proven ways to build page rank and yet requires so much effort and money to be spent on creating spam content. I only wish that the main search engine creators device a new means of calculating rank, result placement, and what not.