Jobsite.co.uk are forum spamming

Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: January 24th, 2008 Published in: Spam

Quick rant here.

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.“

Comments

  1. Posted by: B10G Date posted: 25th January, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    Looks like your moderators workload could double as jobsite are looking for another unexperienced link monkey!!!

    http://www.jobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/vacdetails.pl?selection=926539124&src=search

  2. Posted by: Gary Date posted: 25th January, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    Hi Scott,

    Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention.

    We have been working with a reputable agency to improve our search performance. 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.

    We have investigated how this could happen and the agency has confirmed that this was a one-off incident by an inexperienced member of their team, who has since left the company.

    The individual was not asked to take this approach by ourselves or his employers and simply made a poor, uninformed choice. The agency is currently retracing his steps to ensure all such posts are removed on the small number of forums this may affect.

    Thank you for the time you have spent removing these errant posts. Whilst we’re endeavouring to remove all such entries ourselves, should you find any spam posts bearing our name, we would appreciate it if you would alert us to any we missed.

    Thanks for your time and efforts,

    Gary Robinson

    Jobsite Marketing Manager

  3. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 25th January, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    Hi Gary, thanks for taking the time to drop by. Apologies for the delay in posting your comment – amusingly it was caught by the Askimet spam filter.

    That guy who did all this really gets around – he seems to roam around SEO agencies doing crazy shit to big brand campaigns with absolutely no controls in place whatsoever! Maybe he was the same guy who did silly stuff to the BigMouthMedia site that got them banned from Google? I seem to recall them using the same excuse!

    Hell, he’s even been submitting made for SEO articles to ezines and the like. Fair play – I’ve never met an individual who would even consider link dropping on forums or writing articles with keyword rich deep links before they knew what SEO was. Perhaps your SEO agency should have kept him on board – he seems to be ahead of the curve in some respects! ;)

    Odd that he’s dissapeared a week after he did all this stuff, but before you or your agency found out what he was doing though. It would seem to me that if your agency had any employee exiting the company there would have been some kind of handover – particularly given this bright young new start was instantly given resposibility for link building for a big brand campaign.

    Am I tired being sarcastic yet? Possibly.

    OK sarcasm aside for a minute…

    I know you didn’t intend any harm with the spam – this blog post was just intended to serve as an example of how link whoring can have a negative impact on marketing.

    The one thing that still bothers me is that I don’t see any apology for wasting my time and the time of my moderators. I know this isn’t Gary’s fault and in fairness he did respond quickly and eloquently. So how about you get your SEO agency email me a private apology and we’ll let it lie at that?

    Scott

  4. Posted by: Richard Boyd Date posted: 26th January, 2008 at 4:48 am

    I wonder when Google start charging for alerts?

    “So how about you get your SEO agency email me a private apology and we’ll let it lie at that?”

    Excellent point Scott that would be a face saving move for Jobsite.co.uk and a real smack in the teeth for the newbie company that they employed. I like it!

  5. Posted by: Richard Boyd Date posted: 26th January, 2008 at 4:49 am

    BTW the css on your site has gone to pot! :(

  6. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 26th January, 2008 at 5:33 am

    Yeh don’t know what was going on with the CSS – I changed the theme in the meantime. I checked through the past year’s posts and it only affected a couple and then only with Firefox. Couldn’t find any obvious problems, but was probably me making some modifications. :-)

  7. Posted by: Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog » Blog Archive » Temp theme for a while Date posted: 26th January, 2008 at 6:21 am

    [...] Rich pointed out some bugs with this one that I didn’t know about, and also found a hacked post with a sneaky hidden link in it. :-/  *grumble* [...]

  8. Posted by: There is no such thing as forum spam Date posted: 13th February, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    [...] wonder if the guy works for Jobsite [...]

  9. Posted by: Jobsite.co.uk forum spam follow up Date posted: 15th February, 2008 at 4:02 pm

    [...] on from my post last month about Jobsite.co.uk spamming my forums I thought I would do a little homework on the subject.  Some may consider this a pointless [...]

  10. Posted by: BBPR (Band & Brown) email spamming on behalf of Jobsite.co.uk Date posted: 18th February, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    [...] that’s right.  Only a few weeks after Jobsite’s SEO agency were spamming my forums, their PR agency (BBPR.com aka Band & Brown) are now spamming my inbox with unsoliticted [...]

  11. Posted by: Staff got some time on their hands? Here’s some SEO related bits n’ pieces they can be getting on with Date posted: 7th April, 2008 at 11:34 pm

    [...] Don’t do this simply for link building – that can lead to a world of pain.  Just look at the negative publicity Jobsite got after spamming one of my forums! [...]