Monthly Archives: January 2013

SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which is the methodology in which many different techniques or strategies are employed to try and get websites ranking higher in the search engines. Blog comment spamming is done in the name of SEO to try and get more backlinks to a website. Generally, websites with more backlinks from other websites will rank higher in the search engines. The true professional SEO’s despise the spammers for two reasons. They probably own websites that are being spammed by them and, secondly, spammers pretend to be SEO’s and sell “SEO” packages, which are really just junk link spam packages. Inevitably the strategy fails and it gives the whole SEO industry a bad name. Google, in particular is clamping down on websites that resort to the spam link building. Spam link building is the blog comments spam (that I am ridiculing here in this site); the forum profile spam; the web directory spam; wiki spam; the press release spam; the social bookmarking spam; the Twitter spam; etc. It does not work well in the medium to long term. Sites that rely on these forms of link building will fail over the longer term.

Spammers love YouTube and YouTube hates them! YouTube is haven for spammer wanting a free ride. An extraordinary amount of video is uploaded to YouTube every hour. A common tactic of spammer is to produce a what is really a useless video which might juts be a picture or a couple of PowerPoint slides about a product, and then in the description add an affiliate link. This is totally against YouTube’s policy but it can stay under the radar scope due to the shear volume of clips that are uploaded. The problem with this tactic is that it is always destined to fail. As the video, are never any good, they never get seen (let alone seen by someone who will click on the affiliate link fro the spammer to make money). And if anyone does see the video, many report it for spam, s its gone anyway! Spammer looses either way. That does not stop them from trying!

Twitter have a whole department to deal with spam. I have no idea why they need it as a spam does not seem to get very far on Twitter and I have no idea why a spammer would even want to use it for spam. I used to see some spam a while back, mostly Amazon.com affiliate links, but lately there has not been any that I have seen.

How do you use Twitter? Who do you follow? You should only be following those that tweet the kind of information that you want in your daily life or your work. What is the point in following a whole lot of other who do not post useful information? Why would you follow someone that spams? There is nothing in it for spammers, though they try.

Some places, like over at Fiverr, will try and sell you a service to get you a 1000 or so followers that you can tweet to. But who are they; they are all fake accounts and do not have the slightest interest in the information that you are tweeting, so why bother? There are plenty of ways to try and make money from Twitter; but there are even better ways to get timely information to act on!

Twitter is great. Use it for what it is intended for. Tweet what your followers want to read about. Follow those who tweet what you want to read about. Cut loose all the others.

If Google or any other search engine wanted to know what sites they should not rank, they should just start up an anonymous web directory and wait for the spammers. The good sites never submit to web directory’s. They then could lower the rank of each website that submits to the web directory!

I have seen the cess pool of crap that gets submitted to web directories and they really are that bad. The spammers never read the guidelines. Never submit to the right category. Always have non-guideline complaint titles and descriptions of their sites. Why do they bother? They want a free link from the website, so don’t you think the best they can do is actually get the guidelines right? Why make it hard for the directory owner to list their sites! Even this owner of a forum directory complains that he gets 20 to 100 submissions a day; but only 1 or so a week is actually a forum! Just shows you how stupid spammers are that they submit to the wrong directory. There are plenty of directory lists available. I guess they just go to them and blindly submit away.

Spammers also pay attention to the Alexa rankings; other don’t! The Alexa rankings are are rating of website based on the traffic that a website gets from those who have the Alexa tool bar installed in their browser. The lower a website Alexa score, the more traffic a site is supposed to be getting. There are many ways to fake an Alexa rankings and there are services that can lower it for you. Spammers will go to many lengths to make their site appear better based on the Alexa rankings. I have no idea what they would want to do that for. The Alexa rankings count for nothing. They are not used by the search engines for rankings or anything like that. But, hey, since when as that stopped a spammer doing anything? Despite all that you still see them asking in forums how to improve it!

DMOZ or the ODP (Open Directory Project) is a very large directory of websites owned by AOL and run by volunteers. It is or was widely believed that DMOZ is a web directory that the search engines give special weight to if a site is listed there and rank it higher in the search engines. That may have been the case in the past, but is debatable if that is the case today or not. As its did or might still carry some weight, all webmasters want to get listed there and if they don’t they complain loudly in webmaster and SEO forums will all sorts of silly allegations of corruption amongst the editors and favoritism etc.

So what do so many do to try and get listed? Rather than follow the guidelines, they SPAM! They just keep on resubmitting the site on a regular basis in a hope to get the attention of the editor in a category. The problem is, resubmitting just overwrites the old submission with the new date, so they keep moving the site to the back of the queue for the editor to review it. If they submit too many times too often, DMOZ will just block the site all together, so the spamming does not pay.

The guidelines are clear. They say to only submit once to the one best category. Doing anything ore than that is not going to work or be productive. Here is some good advice and how to get listed in DMOZ.

However, we all know that spammers never read, let alone understand the guidelines that they agreed they had read and understood.