41–50 of 108 posts
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.
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…
1. fofou.org hosts the forum for my SumatraPDF site, which is 33,279 in Alexa. I think that's enough of a target, more than most forums out there.
2. I don't think it's productive to bring top 1000 websites into this particular discussion. OP's forum wasn't that popular and most forums, by definition, won't be either.
Once you're there you're playing a completely different game and at that level you should have resources to win it. I don't see spam on Wikipedia, StackExchange, Quora, HN etc. When there's will, there's a way to fight spam.
Also deleted forum footprint to dodge people scraping my forum off of Google, so that takes care of about 99% of all spam attempts. Someone would have to custom register accounts on my forum to get in, after which they would be destroyed by the spam catcher :)
One way to combat this problem is to deny new users the ability to post links by replacing the link text with [removed]. HN has a karma system with thresholds that must be passed in order to get additional privileges (like down-voting). If you have a site that assigns karma to users (even if it's a secret number) then you can set a threshold for allowing links to pass through. It's not perfect but it's better than le…
nofollow all external links point external links through a redirect like /out?to= and put /out in you robots.txt change your url structure and simply 404 the pages with spammy links
I have a forum where I've been battling spam for years, and since the beginning all external links have been nofollowed... AFAIK this made no difference whatsoever.
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…
Yes, that means I'm talking about a lot of online businesses.
The intelligent thing to do is sell a product or service that has value on its own and neither relies on SEO nor is it likely to be blames by other sites or companies for lowering their SEO.
I feel bad for these folks, but if you are planning on starting a business that doesn't really provide much value on its own that is identifyable outside of the roach motel of SEO, then you are headed into the ocean in a dingy with a small outboard motor, imo.
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…
Don't hate on all SEOs just because of the overall clown-ness of the space :( there are some good guys!
Googles heuristic would work be much more effective if people didn't screw with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No offense taken. 2 comments, though: 1. fofou.org hosts the forum for my SumatraPDF site, which is 33,279 in Alexa. I think that's enough of a target, more than most forums out there. 2. I don't think it's productive to bring top 1000 websites into this particular discussion. OP's forum wasn't that popular and most forums, by definition, won't be either. Once you're there you're playing a completely different game a…
Your software solutions can do only so much. Wikipedia, StackExchange etc has Human monitoring (volunteers who report spam) in addition to automated stuff.
Its tough keeping up with spam.
I was active in a now dead forum that would get hit once or twice a week. The mods would clean it up with in a half a day but until then those posts would just sit. Does the Google web crawler consider words in replies to the spam post? I used to reply occasionally with words like: scam, fraud, got ripped off. I have always wondered if I was wasting my time. A few times I checked the link to see if it went some where legitimate (Google the base url), if so, I then searched the site for an informational web form. If there was one, left a message that their SEO company was using sleazy methods with a link to the forum post.
Google ought to make a code phrase that forum users can use to red flag spam posts. Though some of the posts were for Japanese and Chinese sites. The spam might not have been meant for Google but other search engines...