Am I the only one that wishes people would chill out on their “SEO”?
I know people want to get links and rankings and traffic, but for Pete’s sake, they go at it the wrong way, and then post it on my site. So then I have to be increasingly vigilant in catching and removing spam.
For some people, “content” is nothing more than hiring someone to write something on the cheap, or “article spinning”, using a program to rewrite content.
For some people, “quality link building” is becoming a member of my forum for the sole purpose of posting a link in their profile (not signature), and then pinging the member page (which has zero posts). It was great to see that I had 50,000 members on my forum until I started to realize what was going on. By the way, a good thing to do is a “site:yoursite.com” search and get the “Latest” results, and you can often see if member pages are being pinged.
And speaking of spammy links such as in signatures, I am finding that many of the people with a poor seo plan are the same people whose sites become parked pages or even malware pages 6 months from now. So if you’re not careful, you end up linking to malware or parked or otherwise invalid locations. That can’t be good for SEO.
And of course there’s the classic email where someone has a new site, and they want to “exchange links” with my pagerank 6 site, and of course they want to exchange “sitewide links”. This is one of the reasons to this day we have been very limited in the emailing features we offer in our software, as we don’t want to be the next email spam tool.
Any other situations where “your seo is bad for my seo”?
Why do you speak about spammy links in signatures when your signature is decorated as a Christmas tree?
I mean, why do you complain at all when YOU are involved in SEO?! I guess I will have to keep responding you all the time by just asking you question, but you as a SEO how do you get those links? And don’t come on telling me you use link bait or something similar, because to create the link bait you do need the audience and with only social marketing you can’t keep up for that long (yeah it can help, but won’t bring you on first page for your main keywords).
So again, what actually IS that others are doing but you aren’t doing or haven’t done on your first SEO steps? You never ask for a link exchange? You never do article marketing? You never put links in your signature? How did you got a pagerank of 6 without doing all that?
I feel for you DV, those so called SEO methods are a blight on the whole internet. Well actually it’s got more to do with marketing and not proper search engine optimisation [cue flaming from non-savvy “SEO’s”].
Let’s face it, we have thousands of so called SEO companies doing nothing more than spamming the web in any place they can, all in a desparate attempt to fool search engines into thinking their crap sites are somehow important to web users.
Fortunately it seems from where I’m sitting that Google and others is doing a fairly good job in weeding out sub standard sites, I’ve noticed from my own searches that spam sites come up much less frequently then they used to.
Forums and blogs are easy targets of course. Personally I think that the ability to post links on such sites should be earnt and not just given out willy nilly. By doing something like that you effectively shut out spammers who are only there for backlinks, and in turn do a little bit to making the web a better place.
I think it’s time for all web site owners to start taking a firm stand on this subject, let’s make some universal best practices that site owners can use to keep their own sites clean. Reduce the outlets that spammers can use and force the buggers out!
@ trapped - DVduval’s sig links are to the company that he runs, and his home page has a “PR6” (for what it’s worth) because his product is popular and a frequently visited site
Oh I am very aware about that, but that wasn’t the point. The point is: How do you become popular and a frequently visited site without the initial promotion? Also isn’t that a script designed that requests a link back in order to get a site listed to the site that is using that script (ding ding…link exchange)?
Second stage, his site is indeed popular since you get a link slapped in the footer even tho you purchase the script…
Practically he has created a script that has the option to request a link in exchange for a listing (he did thought of that, its not that he just came up with that idea, and now bashes those that are trying to do what he used to do, yeah link exchange because WE HAVE ALL DONE THAT).
That’s what kinda irritated me when I did read the post, but aside that I do COMPLETELY understand him how frustrating can be to maintain a forum clean from spammers. Just increase the number of posts users are allowed to paste links, don’t count the posts in the “Hello I am new here” section and sleep tight. If even that doesn’t help then make the links in the forum nofollow (but would you be also fair to yourself and make nofollow the links at the footer of your script too?)
Here on Sitepoint, they indeed have closed a spammer loophole in that our signatures are not spiderable by google. Now if someone on the Sitepoint staff came to me and told me they wanted me to change my signature, I would be happy to take up that issue with them. But let’s be clear that signatures and SEO were indeed an issue on Sitepoint, and they appropriately took action remove any benefit from an SEO standpoint (and remove the NEGATIVE repercussion of allowing spammy signatures to be spidered by Google).
@trapped
Indeed link exchange is something that once brought about a positive result, and still can bring about a positive result if done appropriately. The problem with link exchange is when you start doing sitewide links or exchange links with 100s of sites with the only motive being SEO, which actually produces the opposite result. By default in our software, reciprocal linking is disabled for that very reason. Now I try to somewhat take off my marketing hat here at Sitepoint. As a token of good will, I will remove the blocks on the left of my signature. It’s something someone esle did a while ago, that I thought was innovative at the time. That said, signatures are part of the motif here. (just not part of the SEO here).
Link exchanges with relevant relates sites are worthwhile for a number of reasons of which SEO is just one of the more minor ones.
Having links in your forum signature is most useful when the links go to sites that are related to what you are posting about on the forums. That way those who read your posts and want to learn more will actually follow the links back to your site. The links need to be relevant for that to happen and the sig links have no connection with SEO.
In all of the cases mentioned by dvduval it isn’t SEO that is actually being performed, it is spamming. It is just that the people who are doing it have been misled by other spammers into thinking that those activities are SEO.
Probably by creating something good, useful or worth shouting about then letting word of mouth do the rest. Not so long ago before blogging became popular, and before social networking sites/twitter etc, word of mouth was the best marketing tool around, and you’d get mates emailing you links to interesting stuff they’d found.
It’s a simple marketing practice that has been around for literally decades and many developers still require a link back as part of the licencing agreement, for both commercial and various open source flavours. In the commercial world many developers offer licencing options that permit you to remove the link back.
Back in the day it was these sort of links that helped promote scripts, services, directories… all sorts of sites.
Indeed, you need to shout about it. Someones product is worth the hell out, and to someone that product might be just a piece of crap, but you need anyway to get it promoted.
Yeah, or you would have the marketing group or the product developer do that for your mates…even back in the days
Yup indeed it is a simple marketing practice, I do it, we all do it, wonder why in this thread it was mentioned that “I get sick when people ask me to exchange links”, hey its worth asking and no one is forcing you to accept that. Just refuse it and peace in mind, i get such emails all the time and when some ones site is worth linking to I would gladly do it.
So what makes it OK back in the days to ask a link exchange and not today?
yup it is, and someone might be trying to do that same thing too.
The whole point of me starting to comment on this thread is: Why complain about things that people are doing today, when you did them yesterday when you were that regular small guy, just as them.
Just my thoughts and the way how I see it, I think i will stop now following this thread as I feel it is taking a wrong direction ;).
Back in “the days” where link exchange was bigger, the net was a smaller place, and the likelihood people would naturally find other sites in common with theirs and link together was higher. Now you have a much bigger internet, and its harder to get ranked, and people start getting the idea they can exchange links with a 1000 unrelated sites and somehow rank, and that is just wrong. Also wrong is trying to create a network of 100 or so sites all linking together.
Now in answer to your question about marketing software, there are some things to consider. For me, we have literally 1000s of users who come to our site each month for templates, mods, support and other information. In order to properly help people, we need to pay well qualified staff so that we can deliver excellent service. Additionally, our customers benefit by our growth in that they continue to receive updates as we improve the software. Failing to grow sales means we have less money to continue development, and that really isn’t an option. We owe it to our existing customers to continue to market, so that we can continue delivering good service and continuing improvement of the product. And we owe it to our staff whose livelihood depends on our product continuing to sell.
