How your web browsing may be hurting the web
I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: the web can be a sleazy place. Well, maybe that’s not a secret, but I’m not talking about 2 girls and their cup of questionable content, or Nigerian businessmen that have an incredible offer to get rich if you send them $100.00; I’m referring to the day-to-day web you and I use every day.
The web can be a wondrous source of information and entertainment, often all rolled up into one eye-popping image – enter the infographic. You may not recognize the word, but I’m sure you’ve seen them: images containing all sorts of interesting facts about something, laid out in an interesting way and full of pictures and charts to make the numbers fun. Check out this neato infographic about water:
(Click image for full view)
Simple. Easy to read. Full of fun facts that you can pass along to coworkers. What you’re probably not thinking is that this image’s sole purpose is to manipulate the web and destroy all that is good in this world (May be a slight exaggeration). How is it doing this? By manipulating SEO – search engine optimization.
The goal of most revenue-generating websites is to bring in site traffic; whether the site makes money from ads, links, or selling things online, they depend on traffic, and most sites rely on Google to get it. You type in a keyword on Google, and all sorts of relevant sites full of useful information pop up in the search results – or at least that’s what you think happens. In reality, sites with no useful information that often do nothing other than link to other sites often dominate your search results. These sites know they offer nothing of substance and manipulate SEO to get high rankings in search results. One of the ways that they do this is by using infographics.
In a perfect world (wide web) the best sites would come up in Google searches. They’d reach the top of the list by having quality content that users find relevant and useful. In the real world, garbage site jig the system to try and get you to visit their awful, useless sites like this one:
If you were to search for the term “Online Education” this site may well appear in your search results. But don’t be fooled, this site offers no real content; its sole reason for existence is to get you to click on the links to other sites. This is how they make their money. Essentially it is just an extra step between Google and where you want to be, designed to make money off your searches. Google spends a fair bit of time working to prevent this, as it’s in their best interest to make Google searches as useful as possible; however, many people are employed full time to find ways to beat Google too. Each time Google closes a vulnerability, it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out a new loop hole.
But how does this relate to Infographics?
Check out where the water infographic comes from:
Online education dot net. The infographic is hosted by the same crappy site that has absolutely nothing to do with water – so why would they post this? The reason is that if enough people view the infographic, if enough people share and repost it, if they do this enough times with enough infographics, eventually their site will start appearing in your Google search results, even though it offers absolutely no value to you. I’m not going to explain how that is done in this post, but be assured that when you are viewing this infographic – you are supporting pure evil!
Of course, not all infographics are link-bait, and many are put out by quality sites that do offer useful content. What I’m referring to is sites with no relevant content that create infographics for the sole purpose of driving traffic to their garbage websites to manipulate SEO.
So what does this mean for you as an online advertiser?
It means that your site is fighting for online presence with other sites using nefarious practices to gain an unfair advantage. It means that your great site, full of relevant content, may rank lower than a garbage affiliate site. It means that you may need to turn to paid Adwords to get a front page presence, and end up paying more than you should to get the attention your site deserves. (We can help with that 
)
This problem is not just limited to infographics, and it’s more widespread than you may think. Many popular bloggers and websites are paid to embed links in their posts, or re-post infographics. To get as sense of how nefarious and widespread this problem really is, I suggest reading this post by a person who made a living doing what I’ve described: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/
The more you know.
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