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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

#51

Post by jedireza »

Scramblejams wrote: post #7
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?

Not at all. I was addressing the fact that when a 3rd party site asks for links to be removed (and are un-willing to pay for 'time' it takes to take links down) and then threaten to turn you into the google police for link spam... you can defend your position and show that you indeed are not participating in link shenanigans.

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

#52

Post by JoachimSchipper »

taf2 wrote: post #40
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

Yes. Yes, it is.

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

#53

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #22
greggman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you see Mechanical Turk used for spam like that, you could report it to Amazon as abuse and get the account(s) paying for it shut down. I also wonder if Amazon has a content filter, to block URL patterns in Turk tasks. As for bots, IP banning goes a long way.

Not if they really want your site. A place I used to work for was massively targeted by them, and literally the head IT guy gave up banning because they just rented new servers and continued the same stuff.

Essentially, like Jesus and the poor, spam we will always have with us (as long as there's an incentive).

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

#54

Post by krichman »

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 think better software would help but I also don't think Discourse is that software. I'm sure they understand spam but they don't seem to understand how humans communicate.

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

#55

Post by rurounijones »

Would love to hear feedback from the white-hat to this article.

Maybe get a decent discussion going from both sides. It does seem that the white^hat's remarks are very harsh, I wonder if he has honestly never thought about it from the other side's point of view.

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

#56

Post by halcyondaze »

GhotiFish wrote: post #47
halcyondaze wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hate on all SEOs just because of the overall clown-ness of the space :( there are some good guys!

Sounds like their job descriptions requires they not be "good guys" Googles heuristic would work be much more effective if people didn't screw with it.

Not true, there's some very cool stuff you can do that is entirely within Google's guidelines AND gives your site a large advantage over other sites that aren't using them. See http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/01/24/the-advanced-guide-to-...

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

#57

Post by dchuk »

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…

So what if the site requesting the link take downs was a victim of someone else spamming links out pointing at their site? It's not a white/black situation, there are many ways those links could come about and there are legitimate SEOs out there requesting they be taken down.

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

#58

Post by nkuttler »

So this "SEO" who helping his clients to "clean up their profiles" doesn't even know how to disavow links [1]. Well, it's not surprising that somebody who hired spammers once would hire another idiot later.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA and https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main (login required)

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

#59

Post by onemorepassword »

halcyondaze wrote: post #56
GhotiFish wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like their job descriptions requires they not be "good guys" Googles heuristic would work be much more effective if people didn't screw with it.

Not true, there's some very cool stuff you can do that is entirely within Google's guidelines AND gives your site a large advantage over other sites that aren't using them. See http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/01/24/the-advanced-guide-to-...

I'm pretty sure there's no way I can convince you, or any SEO, that you're merely proving GhotiFish's point here.

The ethical disconnect is painful.

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

#60

Post by bambax »

There must be a programmatic solution to this problem.

Do some outbound links have value on this forum? If not, then you could remove all links, or remove the "link" part of the link (change @href to text).

If some outbound links have value you need to identify those, and it's more complex, but a Bayesian analysis of posts should be able to score posts on their "spaminess" and remove the links on only the most spam-like comments.

There may be some false-positive doing this, but since no information is actually removed (only the links, not the content) it should be quite ok.

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