A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#1

Post by slaven » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 12:08 AM UTC

A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all
scriptogr.am

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#2

Post by phasevar » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 12:25 AM UTC

This is a great post that I'm sure rings true with many 'a webmaster. Time is money. There's no two ways about it. If you want a webmaster to modify their site in your favor, you should be willing to compensate them for their time in doing so.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#3

Post by speeder » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 12:51 AM UTC

This is sad, sad, sad. I wonder how much awesome communities died that way. I stopped visiting Orkut when communities there got overran with spam. Also the same apply to some Usenet groups and Google Groups I used to like.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#4

Post by mutagen » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:05 AM UTC

I saw the SEO post he's referring to (it was one of the articles in SEOMoz's top 10 monthly email). Site owners don't realize the amount of work and headache they cause forum communities when they contract out SEO work without an understanding of what that work entails. Or they do and just don't care.

Google's Penguin update didn't deter the spammers, either. Here we are nearly a year later and I'm still cleaning out accounts created en masse by XRumer or other bots.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#5

Post by jedireza » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:08 AM UTC

You could shoot the hostage and add rel='nofollow' to all outbound links. You should be able to programmatically do this.

Then with an auto-reply (or 'link policy' page) inform 3rd party sites that the link-juice (good or bad) is no longer flowing.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#6

Post by arn » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:11 AM UTC

I've received similar emails. I've also been tempted to charge a fee for removal. I just ignore the emails.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#7

Post by Scramblejams » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:39 AM UTC

jedireza wrote: post #5

You could shoot the hostage and add rel='nofollow' to all outbound links. You should be able to programmatically do this. Then with an auto-reply (or 'link policy' page) inform 3rd party sites that the link-juice (good or bad) is no longer flowing.

Does this constitute a long-term solution to the problem for active communities? That is, default to rel='nofollow' for an untrusted class of users, which presumably includes all the spammers?

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#8

Post by javajosh » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:41 AM UTC

The problem here is the work. The solution is to write a program. Have the white hat SEO people write a program that spiders the site with admin privileges and removes offending posts. It should come with a "dry run" mode that lets you spot check it. When they get it right, you can run it for them. It's a win-win: your forums get cleaned up and they did the work.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#9

Post by kkowalczyk » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:52 AM UTC

Blaming google for seo spam is not productive - spammers are legion and in constant battle to game google's ranking system, whatever it currently is. This won't change as long as google is used to search for things.

There is a solution to his particular problem: better forum software.

I don't want to trivialize the problem of writing spam-resistant forum software but it's not such an insurmontable problem (this forum being a proof positive for that).

For the reference: I've been running a fairly popular forum (http://forums.fofou.org/sumatrapdf) for several years, using forum software that I wrote.

I don't even require the user to log in, I don't require moderation for posts and yet I had zero automatic spam (I attribute this to my unusual captcha http://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/16fw/Best-captcha-is-exot...).

I occasionally get human spam i.e. someone writes a post with the only purpose of linking to some other website. I just hellban them after I see the post in my rss reader.

And I didn't even write any special anti-spam code (other than hell-banning), because I'm lazy. I can easily come up with simple ideas e.g. putting all posts that contain links in moderation queue.

To reiterate: his problems were caused by a crappy forum software that didn't do much to protect from seo spam.

I don't really know how current best off-the-shelf forums fare in this respect.

I would rather not spend my time maintaining my own forum software so I have high hopes for http://www.discourse.org. I'm sure StackOverflow had plenty of spam problems so discourse people should understand the problem.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#10

Post by bradleyjg » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:56 AM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #8

The problem here is the work. The solution is to write a program. Have the white hat SEO people write a program that spiders the site with admin privileges and removes offending posts. It should come with a "dry run" mode that lets you spot check it. When they get it right, you can run it for them. It's a win-win: your forums get cleaned up and they did the work.

It's not really a win-win. Any time he spends on this is a loss from his point of view since the SEO's client already ruined his forum. It's some chutzpah to get annoyed when your victim refuses to help you hide your misdeeds.