“Dirty” internet resource promotion technologies keep evolving, blurring the line between what’s allowed and what isn’t. So it’s important to be careful choosing the specialist you involve in site promotion.

An overview of questionable methods and consequences of their use is this article’s topic.

Promotion via satellites

A satellite is understood as a small specialised site deliberately created to promote some resource. If the main site covers the calendar year topic, then sites like “January”, “February”, and so on could be considered its satellites. As each gains search engine weight, it helps promote the main resource.

This is a good but very expensive method. It requires optimising thirteen full sites. Costs for design and meaningful content won’t pay off soon, even at optimal promotion timelines.

“Black-hat” optimisers create satellites without caring how they look to internet users. Their goal is maximum cost savings. A template design is borrowed. Content is filled with low-quality text, even machine translation. All such a site is needed for is a link to the main resource.

Search programs learned to find such network trash and classify it as spam. A detected network containing low-quality satellites faces sanctions. All its elements are excluded from search routes. The main site falls to the bottom of rankings, wasting the money spent on it.

Purchased traffic

Sometimes unscrupulous “promoters” don’t want to spend time and money on improving site competitiveness through better content and advertising on social networks and entertainment resources. It’s easier for them to use appropriate services and buy the needed number of visitors. As it turns out, this method has several useful properties:

· In the early promotion stage, a purchased visitor costs less than a person attracted by standard advertising methods;
· Rambler and several other search engines let sites with purchased traffic reach top rankings;
· Yandex.Direct uses daily visit count as a signal.

But the downsides of this method are more significant:

· Mercenary visitors aren’t in the target audience and won’t return to the site that used their services;
· Most search engines don’t consider such traffic acceptable for promoting to the top list;
· For a long-lived site, regular visitor acquisition methods turn out to be more reliable and economical;
· Purchased traffic requires constant investment — when stopped, visit counts drop rapidly.

Visitor counter inflation

It’s always easier to cheat than to do your job honestly. Adventurers calling themselves optimisers have long used inflation to simulate the effectiveness of their work.

The counter records site visits from each unique IP address, with only one visit per day counted. The method’s idea is to deceive the counter by changing the visitor’s unique data.

You can do this manually, reconfiguring the browser to present the proxy server as a different one. The more reconfigurations, the more visits will be counted. Special programs also exist that simulate new visitors.

This way the client is deceived — they see immediate results of the “optimiser’s” work. Catalogues whose counters appear on the site also get wrong information.

But search engines learned to detect sites with inflated counters long ago. The ban and removal of external links applied in such cases lead to complete site isolation.

There are many dishonest ways to promote sites, but they all lead to reputation loss for the promoted internet resource. In the end, real economic results of such actions turn out to be far lower than expected.