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

scriptogr.am

71–80 of 108 posts

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

#71

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!

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 .

[deleted]

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

#72
Does anyone else think that the author should set up something like mailchimp with an autoresponder to deal with the spam? Something that explains his policy, why he doesn't respond to emails, why he won't remove the link without charging them?

Many of the people who will have these spammy links on his forum will have paid one of the more scummy SEOs out there to raise their SERPs. The people emailing may not have originally been aware that the links have been put up. By having an autoresponder address for people to mail to this should alleviate the spam for all but the dumbest of people (that can't read what to sign up to to get a response, or those that fail to read a clearly defined policy via email).

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

#73

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!

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 .

Google doesn't agree with you.

"Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners"

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...

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

#74

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!

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 .

I don't know if some SEO actually do that, but following Google's guidelines for webmasters, using Google's webmaster tools instead of building an opaque site with Flash or full Javascript certainly helps Google (otherwise they wouldn't publish these guidelines to start with).

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

#75
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…

I can understand someone getting frustrated. This forum may have great information, but it is also causing a lot of harm, possibly leading people to dangerous sites. Is it the owners responsibility to do something about that? I think so.

Just as you have lots of machines that have been compromised and are part of a botnet.

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

#76
There's a difference between buying links, which Google actively started prohibiting at a certain point, and the automated forum spam you are mentioning. The latter is done using software like XRumer, and has always been penalized by Google. The former wasn't prohibited in the beginning, when link deals were often mutual agreements, most of the time involving a traffic component as well.

The snake oil salesmen that are mentioned, are the ones who actively participated in the scheme by selling links and making a buck, and are trying to make another quick buck now that the rules have changed.

Moreover, some links aren't even paid at all, but just look manipulative. For example, if you developed a wordpress theme, and your link is in the footer of tons of blogs, you might get penalized for manipulating the anchor text of your links in a non-natural way. In those legitimate situations, webmasters do have a moral obligation to cooperate.

I don't think anyone would think that of an honest entrepreneur being spammed to death by link spamming software.

On a side note, there are plenty of forums on the web that have survived the spam wave, if it were core to your business, you could have protected yourself.

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

#77
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…

I can understand someone getting frustrated. This forum may have great information, but it is also causing a lot of harm, possibly leading people to dangerous sites. Is it the owners responsibility to do something about that? I think so. Just as you have lots of machines that have been compromised and are part of a botnet.

A lot of harm caused by the agencies, requesting the service of webmasters to clean up the agencies mess in the first place. That's the issue here.

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

#78

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!

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 .

"Google doesn't need your optimisation "help". Just create compelling content."

Sadly, that's still not entirely the case.

It's more true than it used to be that content can carry a site on its own. But I still see dozens of quality websites and writers getting far less readers than they should, purely because they don't understand the basics of formatting pages for search engines.

A little bit of optimisation FOR search engines on your own pages can do wonders for your traffic, readers and viability as a business.

(No, I don't represent an SEO agency.)

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

#79
post #57
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.

This is what I was thinking. Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them.

I used to run a forum but I shut it down because of spam. It was a shame. It was well ranked on Google and I think this is why spam was such a problem. It was a nice before it was overwhelmed. I did moderator approved sign up but I was getting several hundred sign ups a day. It wasn't possible to determine who was human and who wasn't.

Captchas and security questions decreased spam for a couple of days but it would soon come up again.

I added 10 posts before you can post a link.. but then the forum was filled with non-link spam posts. Stuff like "I agree." "I appreciate your post, it was very helpful."

I added moderator approved first posts but it meant there was a queue of a 250+ posts a day. People stuck in this queue, especially on weekends would often give up on the site.

In the end people started losing interest as moderators were struggling with the battle against spam..

During this time I actually got a few requests for links to be taken down. I refused them all. It wasn't out of anger. It simply wasn't worth my time. I would need to look at each url requested. Determine if it was spam or if it added value to the site. Then choose whether to delete it or not. Each request would take 5-10 minutes to process. Perhaps I should have started charging. I could then have given beer money to the brave moderators who for 18 months tirelessly swept for the forum.

I see nothing wrong with sites charging say $5-10 to permanently remove a link from a website and make it impossible for it to be posted again.

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

#80

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.

I don't see an ethical disconnect. Google is the world's largest scraper, making almost all of their revenue by serving ads next to the content of everyone else but them, yet there is an "ethical disconnect" by voluntarily choosing to still abide by their guidelines?
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