Can cheating make you become successful?

I was scolded by my leader today, but I am very happy now. The reason is that I have learned cheating will make me fail completely. My story begins with me writing too much but caring less about user experience. 

In my last blog post "Blogging from your heart", I wrote about how to write a blog post. The most important thing I mentioned was writing from the deepest pit of your heart, while when I was doing my SEO blog writing, I didn’t really care about this, for I was totally and completely writing to embed keyword links to build a link farm for my current company. I said others are cheaters, but now I become one of them. The SEO thing is that the more qualified links you build for your company, the higher your company’s rank might be in the keyword search results. The key point is the qualified links. 

What does this mean? It means you need to write for users, who are your money givers. I was hoping to write quality content for users, while I tried to build more links to trap users. Without feeling ashamed, I was expecting users to love my useless articles. In fact, my articles are not completely useless, but they are not attractive to users, for my ideas are those that come from others and have been crudely processed and inserted into passages. My heart had no users and so my articles were not read by many potential users. Sometimes I even felt my writing was rubbish. So, how can you expect your users to love you if you try to use useless stuff to spam them? This is my failure, and I was scolded this afternoon by my leader who told me how to do this correctly. I appreciated his ideas, and I will change from tomorrow. 

This fault of mine has its own origin. Four years ago when I just graduated from college to begin my working life, I was employed by a kind-hearted boss who asked me to do a dirty job: spamming. That time I wanted to be a good writer, and he told me to write SEO-type articles. Probably in many people’s hearts, SEO means spamming, and my boss and I also believed so at that time. So, everyday apart from writing useless articles, I was also taught to use machines to “make” articles which would be different from one another in words and phrases but not in meanings. Besides, these made articles were not readable. But I was told about how to cheat Google by my duplicate content. Even though my writings were less useful, I submitted them to different search engine websites. I was happy because I could write English while others in that company couldn’t. Yes, my efforts paid back. Google was cheated by me and my colleagues, and many of our keywords were ranked high. However, Google has never been marked as a stupid search engine. So, our spamming action paid its debt: Our websites were kicked off by the giant search engine time after time when our boss redirected them. 

The story is over, but its shadow has affected my soul. Today I still couldn’t believe writing one qualified blog post a day is better than writing many that have no meaning but only links. My leader is a professional SEO man, who once said: “Follow the path Google has set for you.” The giant requires us to become rational in doing this job, and in its guidelines it says: Write for users, not for search engines. The sad fact is numerous workers in this industry are still trying to cheat to win traffic. No wonder numerous websites have fallen down and face penalties. 

After reading my terrible experience and some analysis, maybe you think the above paragraphs are not enough to explain my point, for I have been writing only about the Internet industry. Due to this concern, I list some different examples below. 

China is now campaigning against corrupt officials. These guys are cheaters in handling money and power, and enjoy their happiness until the moment senior officials come and take them away. In this campaign, some evil cheaters were also dragged down. One of the most prominent is QVOD, which had been quite famous and successful in China. Why successful? The reason isn’t that it produced the most outstanding videos and players for users, but that it introduced sexual movies and videos to seduce users. This was a shortcut to success, for to some extent, sexual movies or videos are welcomed by some groups of users. Besides this, it also stole other producers’ works as its own. This is illegal. So, several months ago it was shut down by the government, and this black empire collapsed overnight. 

Surely, examples like this are uncountable. And from these examples and my own experiences, I have learned a golden rule: Never try to cheat. If you cheat, you will be cheated by yourself. Or if you are lucky enough as a successful cheater, I just have to say there will be no great results for you. A lie can be successful for some time, but will never be so in the long run. When it is disclosed, it meets its end. 

The original blog is: http://blog.chinadaily.com.cn/blog-1395221-24711.html