to “spam comment” or not to “spam comment”

September 22, 2007 by admin.

Since becoming a “webmaster” (actually I haven’t mastered it at all or even come close to it) and developing our own website, I’ve had to learn a lot about h1, h2, h3 headings, Meta tags, Page titles, and most importantly about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I was under the impression initially that you just created your website, threw it up (and I intended that hurling reference) onto the Internet and there it was for all to see. True to a certain extent, but I didn’t realize how complicated it was to actually get your website to show up in search engine results, especially in a field as competitive as tourism in Beijing and China. What I have noticed by using Google and Yahoo’s webmaster tools is that some of the other tourism companies in Beijing have posted links to their website on blogs and forums that are completely unrelated to anything that has to do with Beijing, China or tourism. I don’t know if this is a conscious choice that those companies have made or maybe a company that they hired to increase their ranking on the search engine results, but I’ve found myself facing a dilemma on whether to do the same thing or not. I have decided not to do it, because I have ethical problems with posting our link somewhere just to increase our search engine ranking, and I just think that it reflects badly on the integrity of a company to have a link to their website randomly inserted into blogs and forums where it is not appropriate. It usually looks something like “Beijing tours, beijing travel, beijing trip, beijing hotel…” and then something in Chinese. (That, by the way, is a link to our Beijing Discovery Tours website - it’s my blog so why not?)

One of the great things about starting your own business is that you are the one in charge and you can do things the way that you want. By choosing to not post our link randomly on blogs and forums, we may lose out on search engine rankings and potential customers, but at least I’ll know that the hits that we get will come legitimately.

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