Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

With the launch of Sphinn last week and the general popularity of community focused sites, I thought I would do a post about spam.   I’m not entirely against spam, after it is a part of our industry in one way or another, but I do really dislike the approach some people take, so I thought I would write an overview.

If you are new to SEO or unfamiliar with my sense of humour, you should be warned now that this isn’t an entirely serious post.

7 steps to get your crappy link spam published

1.  Get that temp in your office to regurgitate a story they read somewhere.  Be sure to kill all the links to decent sources and instead link to optimised pages within your own site.  Horde that lovely link juice!  Yeh baby, a link to a page on your site about Google is much better than actually linking to Google!

2.  Setup one.  No, two.  OK, just setup as many accounts on your social media site or forum of choice as you want.  I mean, it’s not like anyone will check or notice you are the same person.  If you are really cheeky you could get your mates or colleagues to register accounts for you.  Sneaky guys!   You’re so clever!

3.  “Participate”.  Well, just vote for a load of random articles so it looks like you are active – you don’t even need to read them.  Also be sure to leave a few comments on some articles – only if they serve your commercial interest though!   Don’t want people to think you have an opinion that differs from your corporate overlords now do we?

4.  Use one of those “extra” accounts to start off a few harmless topics.  Of course they will be revolutionary, ground breaking, intellectually challenging insights into your industry.  Or just the usual trash you churn out to try and whore some links.

5.  Wow, great!  By lying, cheating and manipulating you have now convinced yourself that you are a well respected, authoritative member of the community!   Yay!  And everyone else agrees.  Really.  They do.  You are smarter than everyone and no one has ever tried that before.  Seriously.  Well done.  Head of the class.  Top o’ the world.  King of the Jungle. 

6.  So it’s time to submit your link to your forum or social media of choice.  But first, you need to find some decent stories (i.e. well written, informative and from respected sources – basically the opposite of your story) and submit them before and after your submission.  That way they create a magical invisible spam shield that means regular users and editors / mods won’t see your spam.  Or just start a discussion that will lead on to an opportunity to allow you to self promote.

7.  This one is the kicker.  If you work for a large brand and you take pride in your ethical approach to SEO, then FFS don’t tell anyone that you have been repeatedly banned from WebmasterWorld, SEW et al under a variety of different usernames just because you like causing arguments, link dropping and generally just wasting the time of mods and admin.  I mean, if you are so belligerent then someday someone will just out you.

So there we are – a rookie guide to spamming social media sites and forums!

Personally I think the Digg approach to spam is pretty good – just ban the offending domain for life.  Fuck em.  I have to waste about an hour a day deleting spam from my forums and blogs – it’s bad enough that work from home affiliate types do it, but when big companies start it then IMO it’s time to take the hard ass approach.

Thoughts / musings / flames?

MG