If Only I Could Strike Back At The SEO Consultant Slime
03.24.2009
Nothing makes you feel "not so special" like having the majority of your daily comments -- that pass captchas mind you -- left by bottom feeding SEO consultants. Now before I explain why these consultants are bottom feeders, and why you could teach an 8 year old chimp to do their job* (which they charge upwards $75.00 by the hour!... adding insult to injury) let me tell you why I can't defend myself.
- When a commenter leaves a link to a useful resource, I want that resource to get google juice. I could use the rel=nofollow trick, but I've found time and again, my commenters are smarter than me. I don't blog enough these days to be a link power whore.
- I think requiring commenters to give their email address is silly, and weird.
- Above all, I'd rather take on a bit of work than require a knowledgable commenter to have to go through a process to to give me (and my readers) some valuable insight.
So, the scumsuckers are all over me. I can fight back by deleting their comments, but I feel like that isn't good enough. NO! I want to flag their comments, and their stupid "college essays written overnight", "flordia vaction home" chucking domains, and have a way to punish them via google. Please google, give me a way to flag these muppets!
This is an issue of morality. I don't buy the argument that I have to make it a pain in the ass for someone to contribute knowledge on my website. Why must the sincere suffer?! Can there not be a way to flag these snake's domains with a demerit, then another one, with each spam left by these damn human spam bots?
In the meantime, I'll continue spending my time pruning their humbug from my site, and hoping I don't accidently delete someone who never intended to spam me (i'm sure it happens).
Notes:
*Who gives a shit how they do it?! I'm sure it can be done with a combination of googling, and trial and error. I'm sure a few firefox extensions can make any old bloke into a "SEO marketing consultant" -- try SEOQuake... that one is good. There are a variety of services that charge a high monthly price for keyword trending analysis, but they are probably just scams -- like everything else in the SEO industry. THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EXCEPTIONAL CONTENT -- NEVER FORGET THAT.
They'll probably try to scam you by bombarding you with crap like "We do complex keyword density competive analysis, and leave targetted guerrilla social media interactions that will directly improve your bottom line". I wouldn't put that kind of shit past them.
If I sound pissed off and angry, well, guilty as charged. There are good SEO consultants, and none of them employ the bullshit that I'm rallying against. They usually advise things like "Write content that your visitors will find useful." While that's not a magic bullet, that's an SEO consultant who's telling it to you like it is -- and they may very well be worth your money.
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Comments
Funny thing about this post,
Funny thing about this post, I just got a call from a new client that I'm building a website for and the girl on the phone said, "The SEO guy from SEO Blah Blah Marketing Co. is here and he needs access to the site to put the SEO links on the site."
I respond, "I haven't built the site yet."
"Really? Oh OK"
I ask, "Am I on speaker phone?"
"No."
"OK good, well you know these SEO things are just scams right?"
"Yeah, well I know you said that but we had already paid for this before we talked to you."
AGH!
OMFG i can't get this captcha to work! Hopefully this try works... I had to use the zoom function in OSX made it a little easier...
nope...
trying again... I was just gonna forget the comment and send you a message using the contact form but it has this same captcha!
didnt work..
Hi Nick, I share your
Hi Nick, I share your pain.
First up, you can mark these people as spam/scum/scam by using the mollom module. It's about 10x better than the plain old captcha because posts/comments are sent for text analysis. You can get a free account with them - I have and it's a definite load off my mind.
That said, most of my comments have been spam - they're almost always a single line that looked nice enough, but contains a link to whatever site they're promoting. On closer inspection they usually a) say something completely vacuous or redundant or b) just copy-paste a section of the existing page. Mollom doesn't help so much here because on the face of it it looks fine - it's just that link to their crappy site that gives it away.
FWIW, I leave the links in comments set to nofollow and - whilst my site is small and quiet - just bin everything comment that doesn't fit the bill. For now there's no joy to be had for spammers on my site (not that I'm wanting to tempt fate, of course!)
Best,
Jim
Yeah, mollom worked well for
Yeah, mollom worked well for a while, but unfortunately, I get 300+ spam comments a day, and have had reports from legitimate users that it turned them away. I'd upgrade my mollom account, but it was priced significantly more than my hosting per month!
Ok... So it seems that once a
Ok... So it seems that once a site becomes big in terms of traffic and SEO relevance, it costs to protect it. That sucks, cos not all big sites make much money. There's a gap in Mollom's product model that you've unfortunately fallen into.
Have you tried the Spam module? It appears to do everything I'd want EXCEPT one thing...
You wanted to strike back at the spammers, so do I - and I think we can. Please bear with me, half-baked idea ahead!
Wouldn't it be good if when you marked something as spam, the spammer's site links held in that comment were sent to a centralised (or distributed) database. A Spam or Mollom or whatever module can then check this database whenever a something is posted. A link marked as spam to often implies a spam post. Therefore if SEOs do their jobs, and we make their sites as spam, the system as a whole will rapidly build up a list of spammy sites and penalise shitty comment spam tactics.
I guess Mollom does this behind the scenes, but I'd be happy help to work on such a module or feature...
Jim and Nick overlook a
Jim and Nick overlook a crucial point: Google *can't* let you smack the spammers every time you delete a spam link, because SEO can be offensive as well as defensive. Think like an evil grand vizier for a second. How long do you think it would be before the SEO consultants started spamming for their competitions' sites?
Shady SEO has its roots in shady advertising and misleading marketing, which is an industry that's been around since satan invented health insurance. There are ethical ways to rank a site, but if you're not hearing words like "information architecture", you're probably with the wrong shop.
The thing that confuses me is that the *tremendous* pain SEO spam causes ethical webmasters actually doesn't accomplish all that much for the spammer. Google's algorithm has been shown to be successively more attuned to the subject focus of sites, site sections, and pages...in short, Google is becoming more attuned to relevance. The new love affair with microformats can only accelerate this.
This means the quality of your non-reciprocal inbounds is far more important than their quantity. With the effort that goes into spamming off-topic conversations, wouldn't it be *easier* to just multisite Drupal and hire content writers in India at 4 cents / word to build real, relevant resource portals? Sounds like that'd be easier to sell, too.
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