I have been running a number of websites on the internet for about eight years now and feel that in that time I have learned quite a lot about the different ways to attract additional traffic to these sites. Over the past couple of years I have been helping other people by offering to share this knowledge and ideas of web promotion. I have to say however that I have been amazed at the short term attitude of most of these people, they are very much people who want the pot of gold today and end up using tactics which are basically a way of cheating their way to the top. These tactics do not work over the longer term and these people are what I call web promotion criminals.

An example I give to people is that if you were saving money to put a deposit down on a house you would do so by saving on a regular basis, well this is what I did anyway. Most people would not contemplate obtaining this money by stealing it from a bank. They see this as a long term goal and are decent law abiding people. So why is it that when it comes to promoting a website a lot of these same people can not also take a long term view and end up using cheating methods to attempt to reach the top five in the major search engines?

Part of the advice I give to people is about the many benefits of article marketing and about how it has helped my own sites increase in page rank in the past. The internet is always in need of good fresh new content and quality articles are likely to be used by webmasters for many years to come.

This advice is taken on board but I then get a call or e-mail by some of these people who tell me in an excited voice that they have just purchased a number of private label articles. This as most of us are aware is frowned upon and is basically just an example of my contacts being very lazy. At times I feel like I am banging my head against a brick wall!

If it is not private label articles it is hidden pages or cloaking. Again these people contact me as if they have just found the crown jewels in their back garden. I always advise them to stick to the rules and that patience and hard work will win the day in the long term. But do they listen? Of course they don't.