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

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

#31

Post by venus »

My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief:

> There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth

To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have no words. Could anyone possibly be more of a self-interested, myopic, egocentric prick?

My rock-bottom opinion of pretty much anyone who has anything to do with active SEO is re-confirmed for the thousandth time.

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

#32

Post by codezero »

I'd be tempted to ask for money as well, but I feel like at the very least, you should ask for an apology. They may not have known that their SEO agency was using shady tactics, but since times changed, and it's obvious that they put bad links out there, it seems like an apology would be more than a token gesture.

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

#33

Post by muppetman »

greggman wrote: post #18
kkowalczyk wrote: post #9

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…

I'd attribute it to your custom software. Break phpBB and you can infect thousands of sites. Break your custom software you get to infect 1 site. I ran a forum using SimpleMachines. Turned on all the spam fighting stuff. Didn't matter. Bots or Mechanical Turks made 10-30 new accounts a day. I tried moderating the accounts but who wants to spend time every day to delete the fefRFGR34@foobar.com account. I gave up and…

I use modsecurity on my Drupal forum.

At the moment it stops pretty much everything that gets thrown at it, and the rest is stopped with Bad Behaviour and Mollom.

Legit posts still turn up no worries. All the crap just falls away.

I also have fail2ban rules in, so those that trigger modsecurity too many times get added and iptabled. Helps cut down on the repeat attempts.

I don't think it's hard to block spam. I do agree it's time consuming though, keeping everything up to date.

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

#34

Post by krapp »

coderdude wrote: post #25
krapp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've considered rewriting user links to scramble the text and point them inward at a link proxy (which then routes out through an anonymizing service like anonym.to). Anything to destroy their value. Haven't actually put it to practice yet though and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately it seems that if spammers catch just a whiff of SEO from you, they'll never stop, like cockroaches. [edit…

I'm not a fan of those either. If you want to avoid having a "now leaving" page while still deterring spammers then you could create your own URL shortener with a separate domain. The link text could be the original link but the URL is the one generated by your shortener. You could even restore the original text with a replace() if you ever felt the need.

Yeah, I like that.

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

#35

Post by Fizzer »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #9

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…

This really only works if you have a very small site. No offense, but Alexa's rank for fofou.org is over a million. No spammer is going to spend time writing custom logic to break your captcha. I bet you don't even need a captcha -- just having custom forum software is enough to stop all automated spam.

If your site was in the top 1,000, you'd have a different experience since the spammers would be adapting to every one of your exotic captchas no matter how many times you change it.

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

#36

Post by ozi »

tronalddump wrote: post #27
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.

Rel=no follow discourages spam due to PR flow, but won't stop it. It still has an influence, however diminished. Take an hour or two and write a script that selects all users with less than 100 posts and iterates through their posts removing links. The integrity of actual users is maintained while 99% of spam links eliminated. You spend a total of 2 hours, but don't have to deal with the emails any more - which could…

No decent spammer cares about whether or not the links are nofollow. Targeting just dofollow links and then having a backlink portfolio to your site that is 99%+ dofollow links looks completely unnatural.

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

#37

Post by argonaut »

javajosh wrote: post #12
bradleyjg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they do the work to undo the sins of the past, it helps the OP recover the value of his forums for far less effort than if he'd undertaken the job himself. I'd call that a win.

No, removing all the spam is not going to recover the community that fled long ago.

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

#38

Post by 8ig8 »

How about taking inspiration from D&B[1]?

Don't charge for link removal; charge for priority link removal. Same day service: $1,000 per link. One week: $500. Etc.

Free link removal: First-come, first-serve at your own leisurely pace.

Sell the old forum to someone else and let them handle the requests.

BTW, PocoMail was a godsend back in the day. Thanks.

[1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4994246

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

#39

Post by slaven »

8ig8 wrote: post #38

How about taking inspiration from D&B[1]? Don't charge for link removal; charge for priority link removal. Same day service: $1,000 per link. One week: $500. Etc. Free link removal: First-come, first-serve at your own leisurely pace. Sell the old forum to someone else and let them handle the requests. BTW, PocoMail was a godsend back in the day. Thanks. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4994246

Props on PocoMail comment :)

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

#40

Post by taf2 »

venus wrote: post #31

My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief: > There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have…

it's easy to judge
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