I love Search Arbitrage, particularly when examining its lucrativeness juxtaposed with the outcry against it. It's not as insidious as farmers hoarding up corn to drive up prices, so I don't feel guilty in lauding its success. Nonetheless, I won't dispute that there is something impure about the whole practice. In fact, that's what has convinced me of its sustainability as an online marketing practice.

I've always been a big fan of logical progressions producing illogical protests. A leads to B leads to C leads to radical opposition. For example, when I first learned of how the stock market operated, I wasn't dismayed - I was terrified. That so tenuous a system held together by mere speculation and projection could sustain the world economy seemed akin to crossing an ocean with nothing more than rope and hope. But you know what? After a while, it all made sense. Ok, there were also some existential revelations made – we are the system, the flaws of capitalism are innate to humanity, etc. – but mostly, what I gleamed was the logic. A leads to B leads to C leads to not jumping off skyscrapers in the 20s.

SEM isn’t a perfect system, and Search Arbitrage is a perfect representative example of that fact. It is entirely fallible with countless loops and loopholes. The buying and reselling of traffic produces a marketing/sales loop whilst the “relevancy” of results and “targeted” traffic brought to a site via this practice is a loophole within the system. But you know what? It makes sense.

The only way to fight against the colossal search engines is to fuel them. Call it illogical. Call it impure. But whatever you call it, don’t forget that A leads to B to leads to C leads to big bucks.