Smartpages - Legitimate SEO Or Spam?

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Author: Niall Roche

Article source: http://www.macosx.com/. Used with author's permission.

Smartpages are highly optimized pages which draw stampeded of search engine traffic to your website....or so the sales blurb goes. The fantasy is that smartpages are the push-button answer to online success. The reality is quite far removed from that.

In the world of online marketing everybody is striving to gain any advantage over the competition. To that end some people are willing to go to any lengths to gain a foothold online. When smartpages first appeared they seemed the answer to every search engine optimizers dream. Feed in a list of keywords and out comes thousands of highly optimized pages for you to upload.

One small problem. Smartpages are nothing but redirects. The pages generated by these programs are filled with hyperlinks and Heading tags that "fool" the search engines into thinking these are actually relevant pages of content. Therein lies the problem. If you're out to fool any search engine then you're looking at short term benefit and long term problems for your business.

Let's make this clear. Smartpages offer no true value to the search engine or web surfer. They are designed for one purpose - to send traffic to sales pages. The unfortunate fact is that any dummy can assemble a list of keywords and upload their smartpages in just a few minutes. Yet again the search engine results are skewed because they constantly have to filter these junk pages from their indexes. I wonder did the creator of these products ever pause and take account of the damage they've caused to search engine results worldwide? Not one of them has ever stepped forward to speak up on this matter.

Of course the guys marketing these products are going to defend them. Who can blame them really except to say a good product doesn't need to be defended. If there's nothing wrong with the product or the process then why does it need to be defended?

Can smartpages get your domain banned? Absolutely and even the product creators advise to never host smartpages on your main domain. They advise you to upload the smartpages to another domain with a different webhost on a different IP address. If smartpages are so totally harmless and ethical then why do you need to hide them like this?

Are smartpages still effective? To a lesser extent yes they can still be used as part of a search engine optimization policy. A far better policy however is to simply put useful, keyword rich content on your site and enjoy lots of legitimate search engine traffic for years to come.