The reason why? I'm absolutely disenchanted with the whole subversive and murky world that search engine optimisation lives in. The rule book says that sites well coded and full of relevant content, with popular and relevant websites linking to them in turn, will do well on search engines, especially Google. I'm sorry but that is nonsense.

Why have I come to that conclusion? Well after many long days and nights re-coding my site, introducing content and making efforts to increase my off-site SEO I discovered what I was up against from 2 different sources.

The Research

First off, I did a backlinks check on a site that was ranking #1 for a keyword I was interested in getting a decent placing for. The site itself was fine, no better or worse than mine, but was very well 'SERPSed' if such a word exists. The backlinks search was interesting: it showed over 1,000 links in (great!) but it also revealed that 99% of the incoming links were from forum membership profile pages. The site owner or their SEO company had simply either manually joined a thousand website forums, or more likely employed a service which did so via software.

Secondly one of my clients has employed a very high-reputation SEO company to boost the performance of their site over a 6-month period at quite a significant cost. The SEO company is delivering results to them in spades and I'm delighted for them. So being nosey, I went to see they had done. A little HTML and some content changes on their site, but then again Mr. Backlinks and his checker came to the fore. Whilst not quite as 'black hat' as the example above, the site now has 1,000's of backlinks which come from pages on other websites which have deliberately been set up to act as 'farms' - pages off the main page of sites which are clearly there solely to link to other sites.

If that isn't 'black hat' it certainly is charcoal in colour.

How does it work?

I've no idea how it all works in actually getting links on these sites; the sites all look legit but these pages are hidden or part hidden from public view. At a guess, there's companies out there who either bulk-own a load of real-looking websites for backlinking purposes, or who pay real website owners to add some linking engine or software to their sites. In a way the sheer scale is very impressive.

So here's the real pisser - an individual can't compete on SEO terms with companies who push buttons or make phone calls and all of a sudden hundreds of backlinks appear. Well I suppose you can - they can use the same services. I did some research and for very small costs you can get your site added to blog comments, forum posts, directory, link farms and so on. It's all out there - just do a search.

But - Google says no, right?

The Google no-no list says these tactics result in lower rankings but I'm sorry - the evidence is to the contrary. Google takes each link to a page as a 'vote' and although the good advice is that the quality of such incoming links is important, it clearly isn't. Either that, or Google can't spot a 'bad' link from a 'good' one.

I know many people who thrive doing SEO - both commercially and in terms of job satisfaction. If it was my job, and I did it 'right', and then I got knocked off rankings because my competitor paid someone in India $250 to get the site a myriad of backlinks, how would I feel?

Maybe I've just got it all wrong, my experiences are not typical, the 'great' SEO companies all use completely white hat and ethical techniques and I've interpreted it all wrong. Maybe? I'm not tarring every SEO person or agency with the same brush - indeed the good guys have my sympathy when they are up against the bots and bashing tactics of their less ethical peers.

So I'm throwing in the SEO towel. I can't compete with that and I refuse to play a game where the rules are so flaunted. The black-hatters are also responsible for causing us developers so many problems, as we have to lock down our systems to stop them being abused by their blog, comment, forum and contact form spam bots.

Google may indeed change it's algorithm to penalise sites who use these mass backlink tactics. But as with all systems that rely on software with minimal interference from human beings, and whilst high search engine ranking has such a commercial value, it will only be a matter of time before the black-hatters work out the next way to abuse the system.

SEO isn't the be-all it is often stated as being - it is just one of many marketing strategies for any online business.

I'm not selling my soul for it anymore.