Fused Nation

I’ve been keeping an eye on several SEO related discussions on small business forums lately, and to be perfectly honest some of the “advice” being dished out by self proclaimed experts is somewhat disturbing. I’ve chipped in my 2c from time to time on the recent discussions, but having read back even a week or [...]

I think most of us know the difference between a quality article and a spammy optimised one, but there is a line in the middle that a lot of us tread. The line itself is very grey for most people, but personally I think there is a clear difference that is very easy to spot.  [...]

OK this is a very old conversation that I had with someone on a forum of mine.  After the thread was “finished”, I locked it and stuck it into a temp hidden forum where I archived stuff I don’t want to be public.  Just stumbled across it today and thought I’d post it here for [...]

David Wallace has a nice write up about reporting paid links to Google this week, which is based on the back of a poll by Blogstorm.  Both posts have some interesting comments on them and while I don’t agree with some of them, the articles are well worth a read. The key areas that grabbed my [...]

So I guess I don’t need to point out the background on Jason Calacanis’s latest project, Mahalo (no link – I don’t link to spam).  Most SEOs out there know the amusing battle he’s been having with the SEO industry. He’s one of these guys that most SEOs meet from time to time (usually online) [...]

I was reading an article over at SearchEngineLand just now and this thought occurred.  Where is the line drawn when a link on a page stops becoming a simple tool for user navigation and becomes a much more insidious spam-like concept? At one end of the scale you can browse through the likes of the [...]

Gone are the days of viagra, casinos and porn – the new age of comment spam is here – auto upholstiery, wheelchair mobility, self storage….Zzzzzzzzzzzz Are all markets getting more competitive or are SEOs just getting more lazy? MG

A quick check of indexed pages shows a load of custom poker / casino text files uploaded to the Berkeley.edu server which then subsequently redirect to a list of casino sites.  Same works for viagra, and I’m sure a range of other terms. The pages redirect to random spam pages on the domain raph.us (no [...]

Hat tip to DG for this one – Sony hired a marketing company to churn out a shitty fake “fan site” for the PSP on the run up to Xmas.  Just reading the story churns my stomache, but when I actually had a look at the site I laughed my ass off. OK Sony.  So [...]

A recent “article” posted by the boffins at Bigmouthmedia explains to users the benefits of using CSS for SEO and finish off with some great advice (emphasis added by me): “But, everything that is good always can be abused. Certain SEO professionals can use XHTML and CSS to hide text on a page so it isn’t [...]