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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

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

But why would the owner want to do that? By keeping those links up, the author is providing value to the Internet by lowering PR of folks who paid to spam him in the first place. I see no incentive for the author to clean this up.

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

#62

Post by ash »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #42
Fizzer wrote: post #35

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…

I think you have the advantage of hosting the forum on the low ranking site. The forum would be more tasty target if it was on (higher ranking) SumatraPDF site.

P.S. Thank you for SumatraPDF!

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

#63

Post by natrius »

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 also just an incorrect use of the term "snake oil salesman."

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

#64

Post by robryan »

onemorepassword wrote: post #59
halcyondaze wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Short of subverting human nature of everyone on the Internet it will never be possible to have a leading search engine that people aren't constantly trying to game.

The best we can hope for is gaming behaviors to roughly align with desirable search results.

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

#65

Post by robryan »

bambax wrote: post #60

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-l…

Random links on forums already have pretty low value. I would assume that forum spam has come down now that this is the case.

As the article states, websites are looking the clean up the spammy inbound links as google has threatened to deindex sites that don't make an effort to do this.

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

#66

Post by DanBC »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #42
Fizzer wrote: post #35

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…

Spammers target HN.

If you have showdead turned on you see a variety of obvious spam (handbags and shoes) and non-obvious spam.

And there have been some aggressive voting rings.

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

#67

Post by will_critchlow »

I can't put words in the mouth of the SEO quoted, but (unless you know he was one of the people making removal requests against your site) I suspect he is not talking about you or sites like yours.

I should add that I don't agree with the rhetoric btw, but I think he is targeting a different kind of webmaster.

I think he is referring to webmasters who sold links (knowingly outside the guidelines) for years. They would previously have instantly removed the links if someone stopped paying.

As soon as Google stepped up their game and removing those links was important, those same webmasters started charging to take down the same links.

I would personally point to the irony of this (google creating a market that enriches people who have been abusing their system for years) rather than calling it immoral. Ymmv.

Hope that helps clarify some things and I hope I'm not distorting the guy's real meaning.

(written on my phone. Please excuse typos).

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

#68

Post by lutusp »

The solution is obvious -- write a routine that automatically goes through the entire forum database and disables all the links -- leave the names, but rewrite the links so they're just text, not hyperlinks. Sort of like:

s!http://!!g

The above deletes the "http:// prefix, but leaves the original destination name, in case anyone wants to object that their post has been edited after the fact. So technically, it's no longer a link back to the originating site, but it's otherwise unchanged.

No human intervention required. Problem solved.

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

#69

Post by ajenner »

Wow, so Google penalizes a site if a link to that site shows up in spammy pages? That seems like a new business model for black-hat SEOers: "hey, nice site you have there - it'd be a shame if links to it started appearing all over my spammy network - $$$ will make sure that doesn't happen." Really search engines should just give zero weight rather than negative weight to links from spammy sites.

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

#70

Post by chris_wot »

halcyondaze wrote: post #45
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…

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

SEO is a misnomer. They don't aid search engines, and they certainly don't optimise them in any way.

Goggle doesn't need your optimisation "help". Just create compelling content. That means you need to be open, informative, interesting and innovative.

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