As a search engine optimization company we are constantly monitoring several markets to stay up to date on the latest algorithm trends. In the years we have always notice that somehow Google discriminates or just doesn't "force" all websites into following their own guidelines and what for many websites would be an instant ban is the success of others.



In SEO the goal is not always to be in the top positions, to be really successful it is extremely important to stay there. Many black hat techniques can achieve top rankings for almost any site the problem is the risk of getting de-indexed by googlebot and basically throwing all the hard work down the drain. The same thing happens with many not so shady techniques that in the previous years were part of any basic optimization strategy.

It would take a book to list and explain in details how every webmaster guideline is broken by certain industries so we will only try to prove our point in the shortest possible way hopefully without boring you.

If we look at the online gambling industry for example you'll easily notice using yahoo site explorer that the top ranking results have literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of incoming links. Being back links one of the most important factors in search engine optimization any SEO knows how complicated is to achieve them, specially from related sources without braking the "don't buy links" rule that Google imposed in 2008. In the case of the gambling industry it seems that this rule does not apply. Out of the first thousand links shown by the site explorer for any of the top ranking websites, at least eighty percent are clearly paid advertising spaces. Most of them are included in the websites navigation and do not look at all natural, clearly against Google's and Matt Cutts recommendations.

Since Pfizer invented the now famous blue pill the keyword "buy Viagra" has been the target of thousands pharmacy affiliate webmasters due to the huge amount of traffic and revenue, some webmasters in forums speculated that being in the top three results would generate as much as $10.000 in sales per day. This keyword is probably the best example of how Google's guidelines are not for everybody. It has been more than three years since we have been constantly checking this keyword, for this entire period the top ranking results are owned by spammers always using the same technique, apparently useless to other equally trafficked industries.

The adult industry has been one of the most competitive markets since the beginning of the internet, for this same reason it is one of the hardest industries to optimize. Sincerely we don't know what could be considered as high quality content for an adult site but eight out of ten results are completely based on images and videos both unreadable, a part from the alt tags, by the spiders. Most sites only provide at most one paragraph of text and many more than the recommended one hundred links per page.

As webmasters and SEOs we don't have anything against the people taking advantage of Google's flaws, we are sure that they are having a great time spending the cash earned by their strategies. The techniques they used to be in the top positions do take a lot of hard work and it is only fair for us to respect them. We just can't understand why the discrimination and how come certain industries, many more than the three listed above, apparently have different ranking rules than other niches.