If we all pulled together

12 May, 2010

Since the upgrade to member utilities I’ve been watching the logs and looking at the behaviour of some of the linkspammers. Quite by accident I stumbled across a post on blackhatworld that went something like this…. ‘Doing my usual business blasting profile links I had my profile removed and a mail from the moderator claiming my activity had been reported to google – first time this has happened – so what do you fellows think? What could the consequences be?’

Hang on a minute I thought….

So I had a look at the username of the person I’d done just that to on one of our client forums, and I checked what the link had been… then I googled the username from blackhatworld and what do you know – same person, using three different names (all linked), posting the same linkspam all over the place.

So – here are some of the replies:

“If they’re not bluffing you could be deindexed”
“Don’t worry about it”
“Google won’t ban a site just like that, you need to get reported by a few more”

So there’s the thing – you need to get reported by a few more.

Now I know I’m sticking our heads above the parapet, I know we’ll likely get a load incoming, but if you’re seeing what we’re seeing – the same user names appearing on separate EE forums then you know that it’s not just yours, and that’s where by pulling together and randomly reporting some links as spam could start to make a difference. Because there is an argument I’ve seen on White hat SEO forums that ‘sites invite it’ by having bio and URL fields but in many cases they’re there for genuine forum members to share a bit about themselves, not for profile link spammers. It’s costing clients money as admins have to clean up irrelevant links. If you’ve explicity stated in your welcome email that profile spam is not tolerated then I can’t see a good reason for not reporting someone who thinks the rules don’t apply to them.

We remove all links and replace it with ‘All links removed and reported for linkspam’ – some are, some are not… if it’s a link to a mom and pop shop who may have just employed someone, I often spend a second writing to them to let them know that they’re running the risk of delisting.

I can’t stress enough that I’m NOT trying to stop SEO’s from making a living, but on forums who explicitly state that they do not want profile linkspam then the request should be respected.

This also proves that it’s not just bots doing this – it’s people trying to play the Google system, at our clients expense. If we pulled together we could start to make a difference.

Rachael posted this in We Don't Like

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