I’ve chipped in my 2c from time to time on the recent discussions, but having read back even a week or two I see small businesses being advised to do some pretty ridiculous stuff.  Its nuts – people are being advised by “experts” to churn out thousands of pages (one per town) just to target different locations. 

I can see the logic from a marketing point of view – conducting local campaigns offline requires location specific targeting – fair enough.  But do we really need mom n’ pop sites creating what are essentially doorway pages to target local areas?  That’s just going to lead to a world of pain for them.

I wrote an article on optimising for local terms a while back and I generally point people to that – I think that’s a pretty good start for small businesses to begin with as it doesn’t directly lead the less savvy to the conclusion that they need to churn out loads of content to target loads of local terms.

That’s the key IMO – keeping the less savvy tamed so they don’t run off and do something silly (which is perhaps one of the most common causes of SEO problems for small businesses – DIY SEO gone awry)…

• Tell people they need keywords on the page – that can lead to keyword stuffing or hidden text.
• Tell people they need different pages to target different keywords – that can lead to doorway pages or crap content pages.

We need to educate our market – but we need to educate responsibly

The amount of rubbish that is being sold as “fact” around the SEO world is becoming ridiculous.  Just in the past week I’ve seen the following “facts” being posted on forums by people offering professional SEO services:

1. Big directories aren’t well optimised – they just rank well because of their homepage PR.
2. Directories are well optimised – you need to add more keywords to your page to compete.
3. Keyword domains rank better than non keyword domains.
4. Just get deep links to compete with larger sites targeting local areas.
5. The more pages you have the more keywords you can target.  I have thousands of pages for (mid competitive key term) one for each town in the UK.

OK, these aren’t necessarily bad statements – but taken in context they can be very dangerous for small businesses.

These statements are made by low experience SEOs probably based on some mild success they’ve had.  Fair enough – but in most cases the advice is grossly inappropriate for the situation – the SEOs simply don’t have a sufficient understanding of how search works to be able to give out solid advice…

1. Yeh, big directories may have a strong homepage PR – that doesn’t necessarily mean that all their local rankings are a consequence of that.  Sending out this message to a small business will only result on them embarking on a quest for PR which would be a fools errand and potentially risky (if they start messing with paid links, cross linking sites, hording PR and so on).
2. Yeh, some directories may be well optimised but telling a small business site to add more keywords to their page is plain stupid.  There’s a sweet spot to hit with on page optimisation and if you don’t make that clear to small businesses they WILL take it to extremes.
3. Yeh, keyword domains may rank better than non keyword domains – that’s just down to people linking to them using the site name (keywords).  Sending out this message will see small businesses sacrificing branding and reputation for keyword domains which is crazy talk.
4. Yeh, deep links can help certain campaigns but they aren’t a prerequisite for success and IMO are entirely unnecessary for UK local campaigns (with the exceptions being high population areas or high £££ markets).  Why send small businesses out looking for deep links when solid on page optimisation and decent homepage link building will suffice in most cases?  This one particularly annoys me as I see “deep linking” being presented as a solution for poor site architecture or on page SEO all the time.
5. Yeh, the more pages you have, the more terms you can target.  But do you really want to have 1000 pages conveying a single message?  How much variation in content can you really achieve?  I don’t care how superb your copy is – if you have 1000 pages saying the same thing it is spam.  The guy suggesting this had his SEO site targeting obscure towns – the pages (optimised for SEO + town terms) had decent copy – but it was all irrelevant (non SEO) information like the population and history of the town.  How is that a good result?  And same problem again – 9 out of 10 small businesses won’t go to the lengths of writing decent copy on this level – it will just be regurgitated crap which ends up as a crap result for searchers.  See my article on SEO agency copywriting sins too!

The key problems:

• Inexperienced SEOs offering opinion as fact. 
• Inexperienced businesses taking SEO too far.

These are issues that really need to be addressed.  There was a time that almost 50% of my consultancy business came from fixing other peoples work – that is not a good state of affairs for our industry to be in.

The problem is that it is easy for anyone to build up credibility as a SEO on non SEO forums – there’s generally a similar level of SEO knowledge and experience on the forums and it’s not like the advice given out is bad – it’s more that the manner in which it’s given out is inappropriate.

Here’s my suggestion for a solution:

All you experienced SEOs out there – take the time every now and again to visit your preferred local / small business forums and help out answering a few questions.   It’s not like the noise factor on some SEO forums – small business owners are all usually very grateful and if we do it enough then perhaps we can undo some of the damage done by the less than reputable members of our industry.

And as for all you folks with less SEO experience - I’m not saying don’t help people out – all I’m saying is that we really do need to be careful how we give out advice.  Small businesses asking for advice are usually about to attempt some DIY SEO – the responsible thing to do is to ensure all the risks are outlined and that you really are confident that what you are saying is accurate (if not, just say so – that’s the right thing to do). 

Small business SEO advice is a very delicate process – it’s not like people are optimising a blog or Adsense site that they can chuck away if it goes wrong – in a lot of cases their business website is core to their living – you need to treat it with that level of respect, especially if you are selling yourself as an SEO professional.

Lastly, to all those non-SEOs-but-like-to-dish-out-advice-because-they-optimised-their-own-blog – stop it!  I don’t care if you got your poxy little site to number 1 for a competitive term – that doesn’t make you an SEO and it’s incredibly arrogant to assume you are qualified to hand out advice.  Yes, you!  The “SEO is easy” crowd.  I mean, seriously, I’ve seen professional printers advising small businesses reliant on their site to change their existing site to Wordpress because “they once optimised a blog and got some traffic”.  Just stop it.  Yes, you people who self-scored a 6 on the SEOmoz level of SEO professional test even though you’ve only ever optimised your own crappy little blog.  Stop it now!

Scott

Yes, that’s only a few weeks when Gary Robinson, Marketing Manager for Jobsite.co.uk came here and said, “[we] by no means condone spamming”.  Yes, this is Jobsite.co.uk who on their own website say, “we don’t like spam and we don’t want to send you any either”.

I have to admit it though.  Having one agency spam one of my sites in January and then another agency spam via another site in February is a little unfortunate!   I’m fairly certain they aren’t part of a concerted effort to personally spam me!  If it was, it would go down in history as a piss poor marketing campaign seeing I’m self employed and don’t need the services of a job board lol!

Come on though guys – this is really lame!

It’s one thing to put a public gloss on what your company does – it’s another to outright state you aren’t spamming when you clearly are!

It wasn’t even particularly good spam.  I’ve had more sohpisticated spam from bots on the forums!  While the email was nicely written and not particularly offensive (the poor girl just emailed the wrong person), again it was making wild claims – “we regularly keep up to speed with your blog”.   Lol sorry, it’s just well optimised for a couple of random terms – there aren’t very many posts to keep up with!

I guess it wasn’t just dumb luck that BBPR emailed me – I am a SEO after all and if your PR agency uses Google SERPs to contact people, it was inevitable they would have found a site belonging to an SEO.  So even if Jobsite did brief BBPR not to contact my other site, the chances area they would have found one of my other sites.

So Jobsite – please, please stop spamming me!  Pretty please with a cherry on top. 

I’m still waiting for an apology from your SEO agency – you can add your PR agency to the list as well.   In the meantime, I’ll mull over just how many of my network of job, business, marketing and news sites I want to cross post this on.

Scott

But I thought this might be a useful little exercise that would serve as an example for anyone reading this – you might be able to take some ideas away that could help you in the future.

What you can take from this post:

• Some ideas on how to research competitors.
• Some tips on how not to manage your online public relations!

  

Follow the paper trail of SEO services

The first port of call is a Google search for the name / URL and some additional keyword qualifiers like “SEO”.  Here: “Jobsite.co.uk + SEO“.

Only a couple thousand results so naturally my first post on the subject is there up top.  A quick browse through the first few pages reveals some information:

• Listings on “SEO directories” (i.e. directories that really have no traffic value and are only used for SEO purposes)
• A Webmasterworld thread from back in 2001, which leads to
• The Wayback machine page from 2001 – very interesting – spammy doorway page!

This all took no more than 10 minutes to find out just now (and yeh, I should have probably done it a few weeks ago when the subject was active).

  

Lesson learned – don’t claim to be clean if you have been naughty in the past!

Let’s not tar Jobsite with the spam brush because they were spamming back in 2001.  If anything, some credit is due there for being at the forefront of emerging technologies which is a hell of a lot more than most companies say.

Also, for most companies, worrying about past attempts at spamming doesn’t really need to be a public relations issue – it was 6 years ago – no need to be concerned about that.

But, if you are going to come out with public statements like:

Both the agency and ourselves take an ethical approach to our search marketing and by no means condone spamming. We have been adamant about this throughout our 12 years in search.

…then perhaps you should be sure you haven’t actually spammed in the past.  It’s not an “ethical” issue – it’s just about sending out a clear message when it comes to PR.  Given this part of the statement from Jobsite is technically wrong, I think it leads to the conclusion that the rest of the statement could be questionable.

Not a big deal – the point is that there’s a lot of stuff that can be traced back through search engines so if you are going to try and solve a situation with a definitive statement, you should be reasonably sure that what you are saying can’t be contradicted.

  

On the trail of Jobsite’s SEO agency…

This will be a tougher nut to crack.  Chances are there is no obvious paper trail between Jobsite and the SEO agency they are using.  A lot of agencies will circulate press releases announcing relationships with new clients which is an easy way to make the connection, but it isn’t always the case as some clients don’t want this exposure.

Starting this search, there are a few assumptions that can be made:

• Chances are the agency is using the same or similar link building methods for their own site as for their clients.
• This may include the same directory submissions, article distribution, PR distribution or deep linking to key pages on the site.
• Chances are the agency is UK based.

While these are unlikely to give us a definitive answer, I can use these assumptions to narrow my search a little and see what I find.

I don’t really have time to do all this just now, but I’ll will be doing it at some point and will probably post back with some details.  I thought it was worth putting this down on a post for reference.

Researching websites can be a time consuming affair, but if you do take the time you can reap plenty of rewards and it is a very useful skill for an SEO to have.  For example, a clever use of search can help you:

• Research competitors (i.e. who’s linking to them, what marketing activities are they using)
• Out spammers (i.e. find past examples of spam)
• Locate problems with new client sites (i.e. fix spam)
• Identify problematic forum members (i.e. competitors trolling your boards)
• Research new acquisitions (i.e. if you are buying a new site – does it have a history of dirty competition?)

Still waiting on the apology from your SEO, Jobsite! 

Let me clarify.  I don’t think search engine optimisers are spammers.  Some are, clearly, but most aren’t.  I just think some are a little bit liberal with how far to take the optimisation process and need to expand their borders a little.

Take my article about SEO agency copywriting sins.  That is what I would consider to be an “optimised” article.  Why?  The focus is on the content, not the optimisation.  It isn’t particularly targeted very well but then again I don’t think every article you write should be focused so tightly on keywords. 

OK if it isn’t technically targeting juicy keywords then it isn’t particularly well optimised – I know.  But my point is the technical process of optimising an article not the actual targeting itself.

One of the main things I think the SEO industry is guilty of is stifling creativity and narrowing focus.  Not everything needs to be about the keywords!  The point is that breaking the mold of intensive keyword targeting can be a form of optimisation in itself.  Just like using the same title tag on every page is bad, using the same generic form of copy optimisation can be bad too.  Not bad in terms of direct SEO, but more for how users perceive your content.

  

A “perfect” example

A perfect example of this is from 2006.  I wrote a somewhat sarcastic review of an article written by Bigmouthmedia, which was entitled, “Google PageRank Update, Page Rank Update and Page Rank Explained” – read my take on it here.

Keyword stuffing in the title.  Misssspellings.  No real solid information.  It’s not real spam (as spam might be defined by most of the SEO industry), but it’s not a real article either is it?  It doesn’t mean BMM are spammers – it’s just a badly written article. 

The point I’m making here is that “made for SEO” articles isn’t search engine optimisation in my opinion.  The clue is in the name.  Optimisation.  You optimise existing copy or write new copy with optimisation in mind.  Creating an article that has no value just for the sake of having a page rank for that term is just spam in my opinion.  Maybe a nice cherry coloured spam, but spam nonetheless.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve all done it (me included), but more and more these days I’m starting to think it’s getting out of hand.  You visit some websites and it’s like browsing through an elaborate Wordtracker printout.

  

Content can have different objectives

Every page on your site should have its own mini content strategy.  Perhaps not something formal, but certainly a general rule of thumb should be attached to each content type.

Consider these examples:

• A forum thread
• A news article
• A blog post
• A product page
• A category page
• A social media page
• A directory page

Should each of these pages follow the same optimisation process?  No.

You don’t want to be ranking for high money terms with a forum thread – you don’t want a core product page to be treated like a news item.  You should be carefully crafting your different content areas to accommodate for different types of searches.

Using the BMM example – that, IMO, is just plain lazy.  They’ve used their news CMS to pubish an article that attempts to target a generic term.  What’s the point  in that?  They don’t allow comments – the page doesn’t sell anything.  That was just an ego optimisation that they tried and failed to rank for. 

If a page has no purpose other than an attempt to rank for a random term, then it is spam.

  

The Sphinn / Search Engine Land example

This is one I’ve been thinking about for a while.  I don’t think Third door media are really managing their content well.

Search Engine Land has loads of great content – it has all the makings of a great news site, but has been confined in a stuffy little blog format with a poor comments system.  Bad archiving (for users) means it’s pretty hard to find anything of use – it seems more like it has been optimised for RSS than for users or search eninges.

Sphinn approaches the news format using a Digg model (which personally I don’t think works very well, but that’s just my personal opinion) - again, there are issues there.  From a user’s point of view you really have to browse through lists and hope you find something – the front page stuff is usually worth a read but it isn’t for everyone.

The issue is that there’s tonnes of awesome content there – from guest columns on SEL to mentions of great blog posts on Sphinn.  It’s just the way that the content is presented to users that holds the sites back (IMO) – they have the potential to be an awesome resource.  But the narrow approach taken (Digg clone / blog format) has also narrowed the potential of the sites.

  

What do you reckon? 

Optimise or don’t bother trying?  Does every page on your site really need to be nailed solidly to anything with a good KEI?  Can every page on your site be presented in the same manner?  When you think of “optimising your content”, do you restrict yourself solely to what keywords are targeted or do you think about the end user?

If you stick to solidly to the concept of SEO, then you run the risk of taking your business along a predetermined set of tracks.  You really need to break free from those tracks – while you can still use them as a guide, you need to explore the surrounding areas.   Digg is a success because it was an innovation – Digg clones can fail because they have the flaws of the system, without the momentum to sail through them.

Take a peek in the Forest of Quality Editorials, bathe in the Pools of User Experience, run wild with the Wildebeast of Imagination and fornicate with the Longtail Vixens of Serendipity Falls.  Or just follow the same old road that everyone else does.  I think it leads to the town of Mediocrity.

Scott

ADDED – a good example of the flaws of the Digg type system used by Sphinn – the Valentines day post made the homepage on Feb 15th – a day late.  The way the content is presented is flawed because the community hasn’t reached the critical mass required to maintain the model.

The guy started the thread because I had deleted one of his spam posts (link drop for his business – not pure SEO-keyword-spam but spam all the same).  It eventually leads to the revealation – THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FORUM SPAMMING! OMG!

The guy said,

Scott,

I am surprised that anyone posts on your forum at all.  I mean with all your RULES and STIPULATIONS you sound like everyone’s DADDY. Dude, I was looking forward to posting here and adding some really good content for everyone else but MY GOD! Even the RULES regarding this thread in my professional opinion is going way too far man, come on it’s just a damn forum for god sakes… How insulting and degrading.

You say you will moderate this thread HEAVILY. Where do you find the time? MLM schemes? Work from home schemes? I MUST correct you as I know MANY people who have made fortunes in networking and work from home businesses ME being one of those people. I even own a few forums but NEVER do OVER Moderate them. I refuse to post here anymore. I just thought I’d let you know this before you Destroy your forum dude.

I responded with,

Thanks for the comments. Forum has been running just fine for quite some time now.

There are plenty of methods of promoting businesses and this isn’t one of them. This forum is here for job hunters to receive advice. Not for businesses to make more money.

I’m more than happy for recruiters and employers or other businesses to promote their services in the commerical forum or in their signature, but blatant spam posts detract from the overall quality of the forum.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect those who profit from promoting their businesses here to in return contribute something back to the users. It’s a process of giving and taking – users get advice and information, businesses get exposure and credibility for offering it.

If you don’t want to post here, that’s absolutely fine. I don’t think the recruitment industry will crumble as a result.

Clearly getting angry now, he comes back with:

Scott,

Please, when you use the word SPAM use it correctly and in it’s correct definition. . .

SPAM is unsolicited E mail.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING as SPAMMING a forum.

There is a such thing as running a tyrannical despotic forum where the moderator picks and chooses what type of content the readers are ALLOWED to see. I personally DO NOT believe that is how to run a REAL forum.

Scott,

I originally posted under a thread here specifically designed to have jobs posted on it. YOU deleted my thread because I simply wanted to tell your readers about a FREE jobsite, that is the purpose of this forum isn’t it? To help members find Jobs???  Or is it just informaton YOU deem appropriate…?

Anyway you look at it you’re NOT giving your members FREE reign to post what they want, therefore it is your members that get cheated out of something that may help them. Do you understand my point? I am partner to several succesful job sites niche and mainstream and now I decided to give valuable content elsewhere.

YOU lose and your members LOSE all because of OVERMODERATION.

Now I’m getting slightly annoyed – this guy thinks that somehow he has a right to promote his job board on my forums (which BTW, was an out of the box job board CMS with no data)…

Go to any web design or SEO forum and tell them there is no such thing as forum spamming and they will laugh you off the boards. “Spam” hasn’t been limited to email for a long time and has always refered to unwanted, tacky, inappropriate solicitons – the medium by which they are delviered is not the issue.

Your free jobsite that helps jobseekers had like 5 jobs on it and 4 employers.

It is this kind of bias, self promoting SPAM that is of ZERO use to the real members of this board. That is the kind of selfish, single minded mentality that I don’t want on these forums – because it is of ZERO use to the REAL users of this forum.

You came here to promote your your job board and the first things you did were to complete disregard the board rules which you had clearly read, then went ahead and personally attack the forum owner and operations.

Well let me put this is no uncertain terms for you.

You job board sucks. It is of zero use to anyone – no jobs on it, no CVs on it for employers. Frankly it looks like it’s a fresh install of a shop in a box.

Your marketing strategy sucks. Your sales-esque posts trying to get people to go to your empty job board were transparent and amateurish. That’s not a big deal because good sales copy is hard to write. But it was compounded by your arrogant presumption that you could come here and dictate policy just because it doesn’t suit your desire for free advertising.

The irony is that had you any common sense whatsoever, you could have simply followed the not unreasonable rules and got your free advertising.

What I think is you are a one man band web designer / SEO, probably working from home. You setup a few websites, joined a few affiliate schemes, whatever and decided to setup a job board because the job board business model is low maintenance and easy to create.

Yet_another job board is of ZERO use to jobseekers – the market is already heavily saturated and the search technology behind 99% of job boards is fundamentally flawed.

The single reason more job boards keep popping up is that they are relatively easy to create and maintain.

Please don’t post here again.

Scott

I got bored and banned the guy after this.

What a stupid approach to marketing a site.  The guy actually believed that he had a right to promote his business on a public forum without any thought about the forum rules.

Self promotion on forums isn’t a bad thing – many of my moderators work in the same field as do many of my regular users – that’s just part of running a community.  But marketing your business in this way needs to be a more subtle activity – forcing your business on communities when you are an unknown is just plain silly.

I wonder if the guy works for Jobsite now?

Anyone have an amusing spammer story to share?

Scott

I run quite a busy careers site and we get a lot of spam on the forums.  Mostly automated porn stuff, some other random bits and pieces as well.  That’s just what you need to deal with when you run a forum.

Over the past few weeks, the SEO for Jobsite.co.uk has been spamming my forums (and other forums) with links to Jobsite.  Crap posts with deep links that hold no value to their users.

What is the point in that? 

Seriously – just how much difference would a few links from a forum make to rankings for an already strong brand?  A PR7 domain with 35k backlinks (Google) – their SEOs are dicks if they really need to spam forums to get that site ranking for any job related term.  A little bit more thought into the on page optimisation and structure of the site would have done the trick.  Hell, MY site ranks for loads of terms and I haven’t done much link building in almost 3 years!

But it serves as a perfect example of SEO vs marketing.

Now Jobsite won’t get a single link from my site.  I’m not being arrogant, but a 6 year old site in good standing with search engines and 180k visits per month could have been a fairly significant source of traffic for them.  Too bad.

You come to my site and waste my time and the time of my moderators, then you are shit out of luck.  Maybe you should have put a little more control over the link monkey you unleashed on the web flaunting your name?  Is it too much to ask a multi million pound company to put a little consideration into how they promote their business?  Perhaps maybe, just maybe it might not be a great idea to piss off an entire community of your target market just to whore a few links?

This “SEO above all else” attitude that some companies have really pisses me off.  SEO is great and important for any web focused business but it isn’t the end of the line.  I can’t believe some marketing departments are so stupid as to allow some tech geek link builder run about the web soiling their brand!  Jobsite may as well disband the entire marketing department if you are going to do that!

So Jobsite, when you read this – please stop spamming my forums.  I’ve used your site in the past, many years ago, but now I won’t be recommending you to any of the 2+ million visitors my site will see over the next year.

Were the links worth it?

Scott

ADDED – this made me chuckle (from their FAQ section):

“You will then receive an activation email from Jobsite. This is our way of double-checking it’s ok to send emails to you. We don’t like SPAM, so we don’t want to send any to you either.“

The key areas that grabbed my attention were comments like “it’s not my business” and “I don’t taddle tale” – I find it incredible that in this day and age there are still businesses out there that still feel that somehow Karma will come back and bite them on the rear end if they do something like reporting paid links!

Why is reporting paid links to Google any different from reporting spam elsewhere?

Sphinn has a “report as spam” button for each post and only today they introduced a “Desphinn” button.  Why is using that any different from reporting a competitor for buying paid links?

The Sphinn spammer is just another business trying to market their product or services – they just choose to do it a different way than you might agree with.

How about using the Digg bury feature?  Lots of people use that, including many businesses who also use Digg to promote their business in one way or another. 

Askimet then?  Comes as default in Wordpress and loads of people use that to stop spam.  But the same people also promote their blogs by commenting on other blogs.  OK, you may do it by leaving good comments and not just what we would call “spam”, but the principle is just the same – you are commenting to promote your business.

Perhaps forums are different?  Maybe every person who has run a forum and deleted some link spam suddenly doesn’t have the right to post on other forums using their signature or profile to promote their sites?

Maybe some offline examples?  Would you report a company dumping rubbish outside your premises?  Or a competitor flaunting ASA guidelines in their adverts?  Or a competitor using sub par materials in their products?

What about some extremes?

Perhaps your own personal ethics won’t let you report paid links to Google, but where do you draw the line with your “I don’t taddle tale” / “It’s not my business” philosophy?

Would you report a business to Trading Standards if they were ripping off their customers?  I would (and have).  Not because I particularly want to interfere with their business, but because MY BUSINESS can be negatively affected by their actions.  If dodgy Internet marketing services are ripping off customers, then the industry gets a bad name and it makes it tougher to convert new sales.  Even that aside, I do feel some responsibility to take action in certain (extreme) cases - could you sit back and do nothing while you know someone is about to be ripped off?

There is no hypocrisy in marketing!

One of the core arguments against reporting paid links is that it makes you something of a hypocrite if you buy paid links, but also report competitors for doing the same.

That’s nonsense.  Why?  Re-read the last line and pick out the keyword – “competitors” – people you are in competition with.  If you are in business or marketing then your are playing the game to make money.

Yes – do that within the realms of the law and your own personal (or society’s) ethical guidelines, but I think people really need to take stock of what exactly falls within those “rules” and what doesn’t.

Competitive business is about leveraging what you can to succeed.  On the whole that involves taking positive steps to improve your situation (like marketing your business or building a quality site) – but there are times where taking negative actions towards your competition can be a perfectly acceptable approach.

SEOs have one thing in common…

…we all want to be number 1!

We do that within the rules of whichever battleground we happen to be competing on.  On social media type sites that means ensuring your submissions meet their guidelines (and for some it means using loads of fake accounts to get to the front page) – there are no ethics involved there – it’s just down to your personal preferences.

Google has many more fronts to fight on and each offer a number of options for us all.  Reporting paid links is just one of them.

I’m not saying that we should form some kind of “Google paid link brigade” to police the web – the people that comment saying that Google should sort out their own algorithm are completely right.  But the reality of the situation is that we have the option to wait (possibly for a long time) for Google to find our competitors trying dodgy techniques, or we can make a move to speed up the process.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have as much control over the success of my business ventures as possible – waiting for Google to catch the competition when I could give them a hat tip doesn’t really make business sense to me.

Bitterness towards Google

I get the impression that more and more SEOs view Google in the way that people used to (and still) view Microsoft.   Perhaps they have been burned by past Google updates or maybe they are just getting sick of seeing dodgy SEO techniques win over good old fashioned “white hat” techniques?

Our industry has been so focused on Google for so long, I think we’re losing sight of how that relationship should really fit into our business models.  Google isn’t the enemy regardless of how badly you may have been burned in the past.  Google is a source of a lot of business, sales, exposure and opportunities for us all.  I’m no Google fanboi – the ‘plex has been as big a source of pain for me as it has any other SEO out there!   I just think we need to step back a little and take stock of the situation.

We have no problem reporting spam on Sphinn.  We don’t ignore it and say, “well that’s Danny’s job to clear all that up”.  We don’t look at it and think we will be considered a hypocrite if we report it (yet we are probably closer to the people spamming Sphinn than we are to competitors in Google SERPs).  Same goes for any forum, blog or social media site we come across.

The exception to the rule

The one argument I can understand is that if you are buying links yourself and you don’t to report competitors just incase it brings a little too much attention to particular SERPs.  Fair enough.  That’s a sound business decision – you weight up the risks and make a choice based on that – no more could be asked of a savvy business person.  I think more of us need to make decisions based on solid business risk assessments and not some odd view of ethics or bitterness towards Google.

Do I, don’t I?

Just to clarify, I’m not presenting myself here as some champion of paid link reporting – I have reported a handful in my time, but not a particularly large amount.  Mostly sites with strong rankings who are pushing the paid link thing a little too far (thousands of links – in one case over one hundred thousand!).

I still prefer the strategy of building a good site so I’ll leave you with a quote from David Wallace’s article as I don’t think I could possibly word it any better:

“Do I think paid links should be a site’s only strategy? No I don’t. The bottom line really comes down to this – if we would spend more time making our sites the very best they can be, we might not have to worry about what the competition is doing because we will be so far ahead of them to even notice them in the first place.”

When does it become your business and why does reporting paid links fall outside that category?  Are you worried that Karma will end up reporting you?  Sorry to say it, but I really think you are kidding yourself if you think that closing your eyes and hoping it won’t happen will remove the risk of it actually happening.  If you are doing something that carries a risk, then whether or not you report your competitors for the same won’t increase or remove that risk.  It just might give you a competitive advantage for a while though.

Scott

He’s one of these guys that most SEOs meet from time to time (usually online) that regardless of any logical arguement you can put forward for SEO, they just continue to argue.  I had a similar “debate” with some guy who run a small affiliate programme (he was provided with an out of the box affiliate site embedded in frames…) – logic doesn’t apply to these people, at least not in the same way as it applies to most folks out there.

So a while back Jason Calacanis hinted at this new project and yesterday it was unveiled in alpha phase – a human edited search engine called Mahalo.  Ground breaking, I know.

What’s ammusing is that after all Jason’s anti SEO drivel, he’s setup Mahalo to basically manipulate SERPs on a huge scale…

Check out the “paris hotels” page – all links to “reputable” (I use the term lightly – after all, the editorial quality of this certain individual is pretty questionable) hotel sites….all using “paris hotels” as the links to deep content.

The result?  Jason’s shot at trying to “make SEOs irrelevant“.  Basically, he’s taking the top 10,000 search phrases (in his estimation) and chucked a load of money (and taken some VC cash) to generate a site that will manipulate the search engine rankings for sites of his choice…

Someone want to explain to me how that is any different from what SEOs do?  At least consultancy side SEOs do it for legitimate clients (and fair play to the other side of the game that does it for their own network of sites as well).  IMO, just because JC isn’t directly profiting from the manipulations, doesn’t make his intentions honorable.  I’ll take a competitive marketplace over one man’s arrogant view of how things should be anyday.

The site is clearly designed for SEO – search engine friendly URLs, very focused keyword targeting, all content will be indexable, etc. – hypocrisy on the part of Mr C.

Scoreboard Media have a great post on the subject – Mahalo:  That’s Hawaiian for 8 visitors a month, where they highlight the many, many, many failings of the project.

I agree totally that it won’t scale – I posted my thoughts on SEW yesterday – I think it’s a sad attempt by a guy with a grudge to try and send a big “fuck you” out to an entire industry.

In reality though, one of two things will happen.  It will see limited success or none at all.  If the former happens, then I suspect those nice folks at Google will have to consider if it is worth allowing Mahalo to manipulate their SERPs - sure it might drown out a little affiliate spam noise, but do you really think the SEO industry is just going to pack up their bags and say, “oh well, we had a good run”?

Nah.  What will happen is that the competition in these SERPs (and as a result, every other SERP) will simply become more fierce which will be much worse for every legitimate business out there trying to make a living. 

Congratulations Jason – your battle for the SEO beast will probably consume you in the process (no one will care), but you could very leave a load of legitimate businesses failing in your wake.

But probably not.  As many others have pointed out, your business model is seriously flawed – I think perhaps your business acumen was squashed by your inflated ego wanting a war with SEOs.  Regardless, Mahalo ain’t gonna work – it’ll never be anything more than a pretty looking link farm and personally I hope Google do the right thing and bitch slap you from day 1. 

Good luck Jonah!

MG

Found this via a networking forum – a bit of a spam sob story really.  Saw a member’s site that semi competed with one of my client’s sites so I checked it out.  Holy spam batman!   It’s like it’s 2002 all over again!

I followed a footer link back to their web development agency – 1link4it (h*ttp://www.1link4it.co.uk).  It would appear that quite a range of their clients have fallen into the same trap – shitloads of hidden text all over the site.  Check out the first couple of examples on their portfolio page.

Usually when I come across someone doing something naughty I’ll spam report them (if they are in some way competing with me) – I didn’t this time, simply because their client’s site (56 pages) vs my client’s site (255,000 pages) isn’t really competition.

But the main reason is that their client isn’t the one that’s responsible – with multiple clients all using the same hidden text techniques, it is down to 1link4it.  So time to give the client a break I think.

I don’t do web design – anyone out there want to get in touch with their clients and pitch for some business?

MG

At one end of the scale you can browse through the likes of the BBC website and each news item, which rather than including links within the articles, adds an “external resources” box with links to companies cited within the article.  I don’t think anyone would argue that this is anything but useful for users.

But this is dangerously similar to a sponsored links section.  Not I think that the BBC run any risk from being accidentally banned from Google, but I do think that many other sites using the same concept for presenting information may not be so fortunate.

The point is that there are different shades of link spam and I think we all know that the industry has moved / is in the process of moving away from obvious examples of this (eg site wide footers containing sponsored links), which is leading us onto a more subtle form of link spam.

I’d rank on page link spam in terms of obvious intentions (ie to aid SEO) vs danger of being dumped on by Google as follows:

• Site wide footer / header “sponsored” links.  The days of this being a “clever” approach to link building are long gone.  Search engines are more than capable of picking the footprint up site wide sponsored links.  Limited long term effectiveness.
• Limited “sponsored” links within a site (ie single pages or sections).  Not far off the first point – still susceptible to “footprint” identification, but a little more subtle.  In most cases it’s just managed badly at the template level, but could potentially be managed to extend the lifespan of the campaign.
• Mass article / PR distribution.  Duplicate content aside (which IMO dramatically lowers the link benefit of the technique, meaning the sole benefit arises from quantity not quality), this is a very easy technique for search engines to identify and take action against if they so wish – content distributed from a handful of central sources can easily be tracked.
• Paid reviews.  More subtle and relatively new concept – mixed in with real blog posts / articles these could potentially offer a much more long term solution.  However it is entirely within the realms of possibility that search engines could identify these networks and “client” sites in the future.  Perhaps not a full on ban in the pipeline, but certainly the possibility of minor penalties exist (and the kind of penalty that is difficult to notice, let alone remedy).  There is a quality issue to consider with this technique as well – personally I’ve stopped reading a few blogs recently that have gone from interesting SEO related commentary to a mix of self promotion and paid reviews. 
• Site wide / limited “sponsored” links using nofollow.  More acceptable for search engines, certainly and you lose the SEO benefit.  But I’m starting to warm to the concept simply because it brings traditional marketing more into play to harness the traffic benefits.  Hopefully this won’t encourage the use of phrases such as “reinventing the wheel”, but I would like to see BUSINESS becoming the centre of the SEO industry and not just search engine algorithms.
• Guest editorials.  Basically – write for another site, get links back to your own site (usually through an “author’s bio” type section at the end of your article).  I think this is a great approach – it brings useful content to a new market of users – it promotes your knowledge and skills – it increases the content coverage of the publishing site – it isn’t too direct or spammy (so search engines aren’t likely to care).

My reason for this post.  I’ve noticed more and more frequently that a lot of otherwise high quality news type sites are bring in what are effectively B / C / D list authors.  I loathe using the “B list” type phrase but I’m referring to relative unknowns within the industry (and should point out that this isn’t any reflection on their experience / knowledge / skills).  While this has relative benefits, I hate seeing keyword link drops to author’s sites within the articles.

SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand are two of the obvious sites that are guilty of this recently (WebProNews to a certain extent as well, although some of their content is republished from blogs so that’s kind of a different issue).  It’s at the point now that I don’t bother reading most the content – I simply scan the headlines to see if there’s anything interesting.

For example, Alan over at SEL includes a few links to his company blog within his recent article.  Not a criticism of Alan or the article (which I otherwise enjoyed reading), but are those links really necessary on top of the bio links?  I’ve seen this loads of times over the past few months on both SEL and SEW.

OK so, a few examples of this aren’t exactly ground breaking news are they?  But where do we go from here?

Made for SEO networks.  Made for SEO websites.  Made for SEO pages.  Made for SEO news items.  Now made for SEO sentences hidden (figuratively) within otherwise high quality news sites? 

With the two examples of sites I gave, I completely understand why things ended up the way they did.  SEW faced an exodus of talent, so they recruitment some more.  SEL wanted to launch with a bang and they did (pretty awesome starting line up, quickly supported by a mix of old and new faces to contribute – although perhaps they went a little overboard in this respect).  And let’s face it – if either SEW or SEL approached any SEO in the business and asked them to write a regular column they would.

My point is (if I haven’t lost it by going off on a tangent too much) is that the industry (as always) is changing.  Subtle link whoring within quality news sites (especially within the SEO industry) does nothing but lower the quality of the site itself, and we all know that search engines can only be pushed so far before they take action.

From a business point of view, I can understand the argument for having more authors vs allowing a little self promotion – I make the same concessions on many sites myself.  But I still think it is important to avoid articles that are simply written as an excuse to embed self promoting links within then (especially if they don’t add value).  After all, quality authors write quality articles – and they get nice juicy links back from their bio. 

The SEO industry would quite literally have a hissy fit if a BBC journalist started dropping keyword links to their own sites.  No reason we shouldn’t expect the same standard from our own industry then?  Or perhaps we should just take it for granted that anything SEO comes hand in hand with an element of self promotion (guilty as charged here, for the most part)?

I’d be interested in hearing what everyone else has to say about paid reviews and their impact on the quality of the publisher’s blog, and link dropping within respected news sources.

MG