Lemongrass Barbados
01 Dec 2011Blog

SEO alone is a bruggadown marketing strategy

by Monique

At BPL, we spend a lot of time working on our on-page SEO, but it’s far from our only marketing strategy. This morning, I noticed a very strange website called divefree.net ranking for “real estate barbados” on Google. Divefree.net have copied content from barbados.org on a page called realest.htm. This is a clear example of duplicate content and something Google usually take a very strong stance on. In short, they should penalize divefree.net for this.

The Google system is not perfect, and that’s how blatant offenses like this often slip through the net. It will be interesting to note how long this site manages to keep ranking for “real estate barbados”. I’ve checked it from several locations and screen grabbed the page here for posterity below. Let me know if your seeing similar strange results in the comments section below.

Another thing worth mentioning is that divefree.net is registered to a company called Axses. I think axses.net produce quite a few local websites. Be careful of working with website shops who employ spammy SEO tactics. If you get caught by Google, this can seriously damage your rankings.

If you’re a website business owner relying on SEO, you should also look into other marketing strategies and channels. SEO is very unreliable as you are subject to the whims of Google algorithm.

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  • Anonymous

    Axses is the company behind Barbados.org, they have a bunch of other sites under their umbrella like divefree. What’s weird is that the divefree search result is pointing to barbados.org. Previously the results for ‘real estate barbados’ would show barbados.org/realest.htm and as you mentioned, it’s duplicate content.

    I don’t see the logic behind this as barbados.org ranks so well for so many different keywords. Somehow they’ve messed something up. Not surprising, they employ sloppy programmers.

    There was an incident a couple of years back where someone was booking a hotel on one of their sites and instead of receiving a confirmation page after hitting book, they were directed into the site’s backend where they had access to bookings from other customers and credit card info etc.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=879735789 Jonathan Clarke

    Yes, it does look like a mistake. I’m sure the barbados.org clients aren’t very happy about it.

    Also, really interesting that Google have managed to flow the ranking juice onto this new domain. That is very unusual. I didn’t realise they ranked IP addresses. Perhaps we should all ask Axses if we can host our sites on their servers?