Search engine marketing = spam?

[JPnyc]

When we first started hearing the phrase search engine optimization, it meant just that; making your page as crawable as possible, by proper semantic use of tags, alt attributes, title tags etc., as well as text links as opposed to images, keyword rich content, and all the rest.

Nowadays it seems to me that search engine optimization companies are just spammers who go around plastering their clients links all over the web, rather indiscriminately. So the question is, are search engine optimization companies just spammers?

[eval(BadCode)]

Some of them... I saw how someone won an SEO contest: it was basically how to prevent Google from picking up on your spam as spam. Was complete garbage.

The net is cutthroat about making money. "SEO" works or they wouldn't be around still. For some people its still about making the webpage cater to crawlers... it's like what happened with the word hacker.

That's why I picked "I like cheese".

[OctoberWind]

if you have to actively "sell" your SEO, then it's not working and not worth "selling" in the first place.

If it's working, then the websites you develop are at the top of search results, those companies are making money off their results, you in turn have greater exposure (i.e. your client's clients are seeing your work in action), and will be more likely to draw more business from the constant exposure.

We don't "sell" our SEO services, we hardly advertise them all all, before we start contract negotiations. My company has had this happen to us very recently. We launched a PR companies website and within weeks, Company B found them via the web. PR company said "You need a better website. I know just the guys!"

Long story short, we got Company B's business, and, by the service/results they received from their main website, we also got the business for their second, and potentially third, fourth and fifth "child" websites.

... All because our "SEO" system on the PR company's website worked so well, so quickly.

[JPnyc]

Some of them... I saw how someone won an SEO contest: it was basically how to prevent Google from picking up on your spam as spam. Was complete garbage.

The net is cutthroat about making money. "SEO" works or they wouldn't be around still. For some people its still about making the webpage cater to crawlers... it's like what happened with the word hacker.

That's why I picked "I like cheese".
But do you actually like cheese?

What prompted me to put up this poll was dealing with literally tens of thousands of spammers, the majority of whom seem to think they are working for legitimate SEO companies. They don't seem to have any idea they're doing anything that's frowned upon, either that or they just don't care. It's hard to tell which.

Further, they seem to be very focused geographically. An incredible majority, better than 90%, are coming out of Asia, specifically India and Pakistan, but also the Philippines, Vietnam, and recently Thailand.

[eval(BadCode)]

Yes I actually like cheese. I'm eating some right now.

餘大中文垃圾郵件發送者。你笨管理員，我給您的垃圾郵件的鏈接。你到這裡不是病毒。
http://www.spamlaws.com/china-spam.html

Are you saying this site gets 1000s of spammers?

[JPnyc]

Well the problem with Chinese spam is a little different, they're not masquerading as SEO companies, they're just out and out spammers. The difference is their approach, the ones who are masquerading as search engine marketers post some inane drivel, often copied from some other forum, and have a link in their signatures.

The spam coming from China is quite blatant, they just post a spam message.

[magalh]

I can't count how many emails i receive from "seo companies" note that like any profession there's different kind of professionals. Those who want the quick $ and those who actually give you service. These companies promise you lots of optimization and backlinks and on and on... probably without even taking to you. How did they optimize your website without access to your ftp???

[svidgen]

Search engines continually work towards interpreting sites more like a real person does. Selling "optimization" that is directed at the engine rather than the end-user impedes the successful evolution of the engine. It doesn't matter a great deal whether the "expert" has good intentions. If said "expert" is targeting specific engines, rather than working on the site itself by bringing the golden nuggets to the surface and networking it with related, high quality sites, then said "expert" is doing us all a disservice. And he/she is doing the site owner a disservice, by ignoring the fundamental issue of quality content ...

[NogDog]

I'm always amazed at the effort that goes into this stuff to no effect: the forum posts that are deleted or never see the light of day in the first place, the blog comments that are filtered out or deleted, and so forth. One wonders what the people involved creating this junk could accomplish if they put the same level of effort into something worthwhile.

[JPnyc]

Not everybody running forums out there is as adept at it as we are. Sure, on the internet.com forums, it's extremely rare than anybody except the moderator crew ever sees any of these attempted spam posts. Many of them are filtered out before they even attempt to spam, simply because they have a history on the web. But there's lots of forums out their run by amateurs that are vulnerable.

[svidgen]

I'm always amazed at the effort that goes into this stuff to no effect: the forum posts that are deleted or never see the light of day in the first place, the blog comments that are filtered out or deleted, and so forth. One wonders what the people involved creating this junk could accomplish if they put the same level of effort into something worthwhile.

Bear in mind, once an integration with a system is engineers, the spam is highly automated and very inexpensive. Of all "marketing" systems, I'm told that SPAM generates the highest ROI. (this was more in reference to email spam, specifically)

In comparison to pay-per-click and pay-per-impression marketing, it costs virtually nothing to get a link in front of someone using spam tactics. If you can flood a forum with a ****-load of links, it's costed you hardly a dime -- and on the off-chance a few people click through, you're making a return.

There are a lot of folks who value "good things." But there are definitely some who value monetary gain significantly more than moral or ethical principles, the common good, or any higher philosophical "something." And they have no good reason for them to stop spamming us yet. The few rogue click-throughs they receive are more than sufficient to justify their minimal investment.

You could almost say that for folks who value ROI above all else, spamming is the right course of action.

[JPnyc]

But automated processes are not availing anyone on a forum like this. We've eliminated spam bots completely, unless they're being registered by humans, which sort of defeats the purpose. I would have to say 100% of the attempts on this forum are human generated.

[svidgen]

But automated processes are not availing anyone on a forum like this. We've eliminated spam bots completely, unless they're being registered by humans, which sort of defeats the purpose. I would have to say 100% of the attempts on this forum are human generated.

Even hand-spamming a forum is going to have a better ROI than paying for clicks. This is particularly true if you're paying kids in China a cup-o-noodles every day to simulate intelligent conversation and slip your link in now and then ...

And if you're a highschooler looking to get rich quick -- well, you may be limited by the fact that you're just one lowly dropout. But, your marketing cost is yourself! The return on that investment is nearly infinite: value of return / (time spent * value of resource), where value of resource = the value of doing your parent's yard word :)

Or whatever ...

[JPnyc]

I understand, but dogs point was that at least on our forums, those published by internet.com, not a soul is ever seeing these spam attempts. That is, none that would never respond to them. I see them, the moderators see them, but that's it. You have to wonder how many of these human spammers there are out there because eventually you would think if it were just a handful they would catch on and realize that this place is a waste of time for them.

[svidgen]

Well, I think the motive depends on how far the attempts are getting and whether they're really human-run from start to finish. Remember that bots can be remarkably good at looking human -- even to the point of cracking 30% of CAPTCHA's. (more or less, depending on your CAPTCHA) And where the bots fail, there's a human overseas doing nothing but answer CAPTCHA's for their cup-of-noodles at the end of the day.

And once you get a human (yourself) to preload a database with a fake conversation between 2 to 5 users, plugging that into a forum could be pretty trivial, particularly since there is a small number of prevalent forum packages. You could write fake conversations independently of adding forum-hooks, re-attacking each forum in your database each time you create a new conversation. And, particularly if you've invested in manually creating accounts on the tough-to-crack forums, it could end up looking pretty human. (a human is scripting the conversations, of course).

So ... webdeveloper.com is simply in someone's database. I'm pretty sure you don't catch every spamming that comes at you -- I still see conversations show up here that are suspiciously well-scripted and pointed. On the surface, the writing styles and even the usernames appear incredibly human. But, that doesn't they're actually submitted by humans. And if they are, it doesn't mean that the human resource is getting paid enough to raise their hand and say, "hey, I haven't had any success with site X."

So, even if a spammer isn't having any success with this particular forum, it's just one of many in their database. And it may be cheaper to simply let the queue processor (whether human or digital) keep hitting [mostly] fruitless sites than to prune the database. From the administrator's point of view, it can actually be really tough to tell where the human component begins and ends.

[svidgen]

ADDENDUM: On some level, I wonder if the less sophisticated spam that no one ever sees is distributed by the same folks to take more sophisticated spam off the radar. Sending out 99% of your spam as really unsophisticated nonsense makes spam filters and sysadmins think they're getting a lot done. From the spammers point of view, that makes it much more likely that the more sophisticated 1% actually gets through -- it looks far more human than the onslaught that sysadmins and spam filter vendors grin about being able to stop. :eek:

[JPnyc]

I think you'd be hard pressed to find spam on this forum. If we don't get 100%, I bet it's 99. And we don't use CAPTCHA, it's a waste of time. We have a method that stops all bots cold. We don't disclose what it is of course because the less they know the better for us.

But beyond that, even with human spammers, the spam control here is multilayered. Even if they get past one, there's more waiting before it would actually be seen on the forum by anybody but us.

[svidgen]

Well, keeping your bot-protection system private can be beneficial. But, it can also deceive you. I might be inclined to argue that any system that relies on secret algorithms or processes is inherently "wrong" in a few different ways. On a technical front, it requires a small inner circle to validate that it's actually stopping known messages and techniques. On an ethical front, you're keeping some highly valuable -- and potentially highly societally beneficial information a secret.

In any case, I guess the main points as they relates to this thread are ...

spamming is cheap
even if you're stopping 99% of it, you'll almost always miss some (even when you think you're getting it all)
spam can look incredibly human and legitimate
and yes, intended or not, SEO is mostly bad, and is largely a form of spam


Of specific interest to this forum, I should point out that the "view <username's> homepage link" under the user menu (when visited from a thread) is NOT a nofollow link. And, regardless of whether Google credits those links, they don't appear as nofollow links in the browser. So a spammer may at least be thinking that those links are valuable. (regardless of whether they're of high value)

And there are some threads here that could really be ruled either way. They're remarkably human seeming; they just have a scripted feel to them. And, they seem to be innocent in that they don't appear to include links to anything or even mention any businesses! But, there usually one low-post-count user in these threads with a homepage listed ... and it's often a very spammy site, if not specifically an SEO site.


ADDENDUM: I checked -- the non-nofollow link won't be an issue on threads, since they're generated. However, user homepages are written into profile pages uses non-nofollow links. And, from a SEO perspective, it's almost better to have your link show up a few times under a particular domain rather than to show up all over the place, in thread after thread. (because that just looks spammy)

[JPnyc]

I'm sure they may think so but only registered users have viewing permission so those things are not being indexed. Trust me, I would know if we were getting hit by spam bots. We would be seeing 30 registrations per minute with IP addresses spanning the entire globe. The huge spam networks control zombie computers all over the planet, that's why the IP addresses are so wildly diverse. All we get here is what I've said above, it's all Asian spam with a trickle of Nigerian thrown in. That's human generated.

[svidgen]

Ah ... I didn't realize profiles were inaccessible logged out.

Again, I don't know what measures your taking to maintain such confidence. (possibly well-placed confidence) Spamming is cheap either way -- whether by bots or by cheap labor. And the labor doesn't gain anything by telling the management that a site in the database is fruitless. The management probably doesn't even gain anything by knowing. As spamming technology advances, they can always maintain the hope of subverting anti-spam systems. And since retrying a site is cheap ... why not?

[JPnyc]

I just assumed that even human spammers were being paid on a per spam message basis. Surely if it doesn't ever appear on the forum, they must not get paid, no? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they just get paid for attempts, successful or not. I have noted that this human generated spam is always coming from places where job opportunities are relatively scarce, compared with other nations.