On the credibility of Spammers…

This blog is rapidly turning into a ’small time’ attempt to ridicule the tactics used by spammers and unethical SEOs; a case in point being an email which arrived in one of my boxes earlier today…

“Fill out your registration form. Please!!” (pertaining to a supposed mortgage application form)

Now, let’s for a moment assume I was actually looking for a mortgage or had filled in an application form with some lender or another… how would I assess the sender’s credibility?

For starters, the message originated from cosmology@punkass.com (my apologies about the return spam, and if it’s not your fault – sorry lads; you’ve been hacked ;-)… This would of course be that reputable lender ‘Punkass, Bitch and Associates of Philadelphia Ltd.‘, who are, as we all know, a universally trusted financial institution.

SEO – There can be only one…

To use the worn-out quote from the 1986 classic Highlander… “There can be only one.”
But, like so many of my posts, the point may not be immediately obvious, so please bear with me a moment.

It’s been a hell of a month work-wise, so the blog posts have been sadly neglected, but… I guess if you have too much time for blogging, you’re not spending any time working.

Anyway… What does this SEO post have to do with a film about immortals battling through time?

A few days ago, I ran across an old colleague of mine (now sadly lost to ‘The Dark Side’) and we got talking for a couple of minutes in the street. Until a couple of years ago, she was at the forefront of the SEO industry, 100% ethical, strictly playing by the rules of major search engines and the World Wide Web Consortium and forever experimenting with new developments in her field of expertise.

During past eighteen months or so however, her work ethics do seem to have undergone a fundamental change, at least where her approach towards clients is concerned. In fact, like so many rock stars (err… Phil Collins, Paul McCartney or Robbie Williams for instance), the dollar sign seems to have triumphed over talent or work-ethics.

The Curse of Internet Article Spamshiners

Spammers have been called a carbuncle on the internet’s buttock. But are article spamshiners not merely making life difficult for themselves?

Back in early December I posted a rant about ‘How to get it wrong with Article Marketing‘ which illustrated the sad decline in the overall standards of articles posted on the web as they are becoming just another aspect of off-site SEO vulnerable to sp@mming.

Now, some three months later, I thought I’d post a follow-up, not only touching on article spamshiners and the long-term futility of their actions but also outlining the many benefits handling article marketing properly.

“Links! Links! Links! Links!*“

*In all likelihood, Google will now pick up this post thinking it is a rant by German left-wing radicals… Sorry

The past couple of years have seen an increasing trend to use articles as nothing more than a means of garnering inbound links for off-site SEO purposes.
Not only have the ‘bad grammar – nothing to say’ crowd jumped on the bandwagon by posting ‘automatically rewritten original’ (don’t get me started on that again) content; writers who are seemingly able to put together a coherent article are now starting to sp@m the various categories of article search engines with postings totally unrelated to the prevailing topic.
An example of what I’m talking about can be seen in an article posted at my favourite directory some time ago.