Since Search Engine Optimisation first became a concept, some people have been tempted to game the system by using SEO principles in less-than-honest ways. Because SEO is often reduced to the idea that keywords create cash, the thinking for some has been simple: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume.” In practice, this often appears as website text made up of little more than repeated keywords.
Of course, that makes the page barely readable, if it can be read at all. But this trick is usually used by webmasters who do not really care whether you read the page. Often, it serves as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they actually want you to visit. The redirect may happen so quickly that you never see the landing page, but it has still served its purpose. For the reader, this may be little more than an inconvenience. For others operating in the same niche, however, it is cheating.
The main reason tactics like this are a bad idea has only partly to do with the fact that they are dishonest. In reality, they are also extremely limited as an SEO tool. Google and other search engines actively check for these kinds of tricks and will push offending sites down in the rankings. So not only is the approach dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is likely to matter most to the people using it.
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