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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

#101

Post by bradleyjg »

SquareWheel wrote: post #94
Isofarro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they paid to get listed there in the first place (paid link for the purpose of better rankings), then it's fair game to pay to remove the ranking disadvantage now. I call it an ethics tax. Paid links were frowned on but not generally penalised. So sites took the risk they wouldn't get caught or penalised. Now they got penalised. So if it was okay to pay for a linkback, equally it should be okay to pay for the remo…

Perhaps. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on if it's moral to charge for something like that. But the Disavow Link Tool exists for a reason, and webmasters can use it to manually remove those bad links. Though they are encouraged to make an honest effort to contact webmasters first.

That google 'suggestion' is directly leading to the deluge of crap in the OP's inbox.

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

#102

Post by will_critchlow »

dhimes wrote: post #91
will_critchlow wrote: post #67

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 woul…

I'm wondering about the graph on Gary's site: what type of business' fortune is linked this tightly to Google's rankings? Is it a particular category, or are there several categories of businesses that suffer from (or leverage) this? That's a pretty frightening situation to be in, IMO.

Oh, there are many businesses at least that exposed. I personally wouldn't particularly relish running one, but that's another story...

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

#103

Post by edwinyzh »

Maybe we should not blame search engines, but SEO really has bad effects on the Internet...

PS, due to spams I've closed this forum (http://writingoutliner.com/forum), a online forum for my 'Addon documents organizer for MS Word'.

And I regret I use BBPress as the forum software, because new 2.x versions are not compatible with the old 1.x versions...

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

#104

Post by halcyondaze »

Isofarro wrote: post #96
halcyondaze wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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, That's oversimplifying the service and value Google offers. This is the typical passive-aggressive SEO stance. Deriding Google for the service it offers, but at the same time craving it's attention. Because you know, Google gives you a steady stream of customers. People use Googl…

It's nowhere near passive aggressive, just a statement of what Google does. Google does give a steady stream of traffic, but it's my goal to diversify traffic streams as much as possible at the same time - Google's becoming less important as a direct source of traffic from organic SERPs.

I'm not saying they don't add value, I'm saying that their entire business model is built on the back of the world's content.

I'm not sure why HN hates SEO so much, since Google doesn't...they hate SPAM, not SEO.

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

#105

Post by codezero »

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'm responsible for helping to kill spam on Quora, so I'm happy to hear that you've had a good experience. In reality, we get a lot of spam, but we also allow anyone to edit most content so this crowdsourcing approach helps a lot. I'm sure the same is true for Wikipedia/StackExchange.

No matter how large your site, if you give people you trust the tools to stomp out spam/bad content, they will use it and you eventually "win."

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

#106

Post by Isofarro »

ajenner wrote: post #69

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.

"hey, nice site you have there - it'd be a shame if links to it started appearing all over my spammy network"

Good way to clue Google in to this network, and then drop it from the index.

"Really search engines should just give zero weight rather than negative weight to links from spammy sites"

That's what was happening before Penguin/Panda - and it wasn't working. There's no risk to link spamming. Now there is.

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

#107

Post by mesozoic »

Oh man that is some sweet irony.

Just wait till the next waive of spam from SEOs trying to get competitors penalized then the competitors firing back and contacting you. Google stirred up a hornets nest because they couldn't figure out how to effectively devalue these links completely.

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

#108

Post by mesozoic »

Aardwolf wrote: post #87

There exist very popular forums that receive no such spam. Hacker News comments also seem free from it. Any idea why it is that some forums get targeted with 10000's of spam accounts, while others don't? What is the trick to protecting if even capchas don't work?

They mainly use a program called xrumer to spam and it mostly works with your typically install of vbulletin or other popular forum software so custom software won't get hit. Kinda security by obscurity.
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