What Is Bait And Switch In Search Engine Spam
Remember the old bait-and-switch cons that used to be so popular? Someone would offer a prod- uct as a great deal, and then, when users showed up to purchase it, the seller would try to switch them to more expensive products or ones with less quality. This bait and switch still happens today, and it’s come to the Internet.
Bait and switch in SEO is the practice of creating an optimized web page specifically for search engines with the intent of obtaining good rankings. When those rankings are obtained, the company replaces the optimized site with one that’s less optimized and more normal. The result is nearly instant traffic when the site has been switched.
Bait and switch does have one downfall. Most search engine crawlers revisit a site several times a month. And when the crawler revisits a bait-and-switch site, it will see that the content of the site has changed, and will adjust search rankings accordingly. In other words, the person who set up the bait and switch put a lot of time into a temporary optimization solution.
It makes much more sense to do your optimization the right way the first time out. Then, when the crawler comes back through looking at your site, it sees a consistent picture of the site, and the ranking of the site will remain consistent.
