Cameron Olthuis

WebGuerrilla - aka Greg Boser writes about Viagra and Handjobs:

Throughout the years, all search engines have taken turns denying that there is ever any hand manipulation involved when it comes to their stellar search results. At the same time, those of us who have been in the business awhile have all managed to witness what we feel are clear cut cases of hand manipulation.

In my mind, the most obvious example involved the infamous little blue pill. Viagra first hit the market in ’98. By the end of that year, dozens of pharmaceutical affiliate programs were launched, and the pill spamming industry was born.

I know I’ve witnessed what I feel are clear cases of manipulation through the years, and I don’t have a problem with it. I actually think it’s in the searchers (and search engines) best interest for some results to be manually edited for optimal results and I wish they’d do it more often. I do however, have a problem with the search engines telling us otherwise, but I’ll save that rant for another day.

I think we’d all agree that it’s pretty damn annoying when you can’t find what you’re searching for because the first five pages of SERPs are filled with nothing but SEO spam (again, another rant for another day). The algorithms are getting better and better at dealing with spam, but it’s still not enough, we need better results and we need them now. If better results means more hand manipluation that’s fine, I don’t really care how they serve ‘em up so long as they are the most relevant to what I’m looking for.

Save all the pill spamming pharmacy results for the paid listings.