Web developers should not email their spam to other Web developers. How stupid is that? I have had multiple emails telling me about some great service that will increase my earning potential ten fold via email spam or the newest search engine spammy technique. Of course, they don’t call their services spam but what else can it be when they use spam to market their services with? I can’t believe that anyone in their right mind would use a service that just spammed them, especially a web developer. But stupidity isn’t just for the young and foolish. Greed is the biggest culprit in keeping spam alive and well.

Just read about a Web developer spamming another Web developer and just had to check out the site. John Price seems like a likable guy. Just watch his video clips. On first glance, the site looks clean and easy to navigate. However, note that there isn’t a scroll bar on the right. Nothing wrong with that if the page is sized to the browser screen and the content doesn’t exceed the length of the screen.

But this site is different. If you have a roller on your mouse, roll it down and you will find all kinds of spammy, keywords below what appeared to be the end of the page. If you don’t have a roller on your mouse, just use the arrow keys and be amazed at what you find. You will have to scroll down a full screen width before running into the spammy text.

All that junk text is there for the search engines and not designed for users to see, hence the reason the scroll bar is hidden by using the same colors as the sites background. This is search engine spam and a good way to get banned by the major search engines. An even better way to get banned is to spam another Web developer who is against using these kind of search engine spam techniques in order to get a better ranking. While search engines may not notice the spam, the spammed developer will and there is nothing stopping him/her from contacting the search engines about the duplicity. Not too smart and certainly not someone I’d want to develop my business site.

I remember when I first got online in 1996. Any search I did returned a whole bunch of porn sites, no matter what search terms I used. Then Google made its appearance and changed the way search returns are displayed. Researchers got much better returns on their search terms with no more porn, unless you were looking for porn. But, those who want to beat the system immediately started looking for ways to get around Google’s algo and the war between spammers and search engines continues. As long as there is money to be made online, there will be some kind of spam/spammer trying to out-wit the search engines and prey on peoples greed.

I can only hope that the blogging world will continue to offer information for free and not fall into the ecommerce dog-eat-dog mentality and ruin a valuable resource. I linked to the spammy developers site in order to show what not to do and hope it will help others to research any online business before buying into the hype and loosing their asses in the process.