The past few months have seen a number of interviews with the guys from the Google Webmaster Help Group.
Summaries and links to all these informative interviews with this nice crowd of experts can now be found here.
***That ‘G’ thingy at the top is copyright of Google, ok?***
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.
It all sounded simple enough:
“Could you come to the International Conference Centre in Nicosia and cover the 2007 FIFE cat show for the Pan-Cyprian Cat Club’s forthcoming web site?”
“Certainly; I’ll need an internet connection though.”
“Oh that’s no problem; the conference centre is fully wireless.”
How many times has someone uttered the words ‘no problem’ to you and you’ve just known that there’s trouble on the horizon?
As those of you who have been to Cyprus will most likely know, the island only gets about forty days of rain each year, and most of these happen between the end of November and the end of February.
Today is one of those rainy days…
Ok, so you may be asking yourself around about now just how exactly we got from a cat show in Nicosia to a weather report.
The point I’m so laboriously working towards is that Cypriot drivers are not used to wet roads; a little bit of moisture on the asphalt and drivers get cautious, a heavy rainfall with soaked roads and their behaviour becomes downright panicky (sort of like the UK if someone spots a snowflake).
After all; it’s easy, isn’t it?
All you need to do is rip off someone’s articles, post them as “original content” in your blog and interspace their paragraphs with meaningless links to whatever the trash site of your choice happens to be so as to increase its link popularity.
But what of the human tragedy and sheer misery this approach causes, not only to the article’s authors but also the poor saps unfortunate enough to blunder along in search of something worthwhile to read?
No, you’re right.
To hell with tragedy and misery.
Nobody gives a damn about those anyway*.
*Unless they happen to make headline news.
Well… as nobody cares about the suffering of hapless article authors or unsuspecting readers, let’s take a quick look at what this particular approach to blogging actually achieves.
The theory (as close as I can make out) seems to be getting a wagon-load of incoming links to their sites without the actual effort of providing ‘value for visitors’ or having the hassle of building quality links in a sensible and coherent fashion.
Whilst on the face of it, blog spamming might seem like a good way of getting those all important inbound links, the approach is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways.
For starters there is the old ‘duplicate content‘ trap.
Since these brainiacs haven’t even gone to the trouble of writing something by themselves (written language not a strong suit I guess), all they’re doing is propagating content which has already been indexed by search engines a thousand times elsewhere and will hardly be counted as ‘original’ by any visiting search engine spider.
Then there is the sheer number of Spam-Links in the post.
Rather than taking the accepted and ethical route of wording their post in such a manner that a relevant link to their web site can be inserted into their text such as this utterly appropriate link to IceGiant web design (You see? It’s not hard.), blog spammers will drop in a link after every paragraph without considering that search engine algorithms have long since become wise to this rather old link spamming technique.
Smooth move, ExLax…
Here’s a little tip:
Any half decent SEO guide will give you a rough idea of what’s likely to be penalised and what isn’t, so you might want to do a bit of reading.
And of course, let us not forget the general public.
These days, most blogging sites offer bloggers and visitors the facility to report spam posts and, whilst not every visitor will go to the trouble of filling in a spam report form, you might be surprised at how quickly most of these posts are dealt with.
In the greater scheme of things, there is really precious little mileage to be had from spamming blogs; which makes me wonder just how long this particular fad will last.
Still… the spam trend now seems to be moving in the direction of Digg, Del.icio.us and even “gasp” the mighty YouTube, so maybe we’ll be left alone over here in due course.
I have long suspected that computers are infinitely smarter than humans and are merely biding their time.
This latest blog spamming craze has only served to convince me that my initial assessment is correct.
Food for thought?
I’ll leave it to you.
Oh my!
Where to start with this one…
As a buzzword, the term article marketing has gained no end of momentum over the past couple of years or so.
Much like an avalanche, things started in a very gradual manner a few years ago with a handful of clued-up writers providing valuable information to less knowledgeable individuals whilst craftily promoting their own web sites in the process.
Blinder!
Not only did these articles get spread all over the web and provide endless sources of fresh traffic to their author’s site(s), each article would also act as an inbound link to add to their overall link popularity score.
Double Blinder!
During the early part of 2005, the movement had finally gathered enough momentum to attract the attention of the mainstream promotion crowd, which promptly leapt upon the bandwagon with much gusto.
The result was a growing torrent of badly written (yet still mainly informative) articles joining the rest on its journey down internet mountain.
By itself, this would have been easily sustainable, had it not been for the appearance on the scene of the sort of monosyllabic slack-lipper who is incapable of writing even a bad article.
Aided and abetted by shoddy pieces of software* promising to ‘Rewrite Articles Automatically’ to produce original content, these idiots are flooding the web with a barrage of toot which is not even remotely readable - in the full expectation of getting a huge number of inbound links to boost their site’s standing with the major search engines.
Here’s a quick newsflash: “Keep on waiting for those inbound links boys and girls, because nobody in their right mind will want to embarrass themselves by subjecting his or her visitors to the kind of incomprehensible waste you’re producing.”
“Oh, and if you’re relying on automatic links, these aren’t really worth anything much in the greater scheme of things, so you’re wasting your time there as well.”
A well written, authoritative article will still get far more exposure and expert standing than an entire week’s worth of automatic output.
If software could write coherent articles, authors and journalists would be out of business.
The last time I looked, they were still honourable (sort of) and well paying professions.
*These programs rely mainly on substituting synonyms and jumbling the original’s grammar to produce something ‘original’.
On a readability and comprehensibility scale from 1 to 10 they score somewhere around minus 267.
Now, as this avalanche is nearing the unsuspecting village at the valley’s bottom, it is a mess of blinding spray, sticks, boulders and other assorted detritus which hits the unsuspecting web-mountain folk full in the face and buries them under a heap of meaningless junk, to suffocate slowly amongst the nonsense and grammatical errors whilst searching for something worthwhile.
Thank heaven for Alpine Rescue in the form of Social Networks like Digg and Delicious which allow users to rescue worthwhile efforts leaving the rest buried under a pile of their bretheren.
Food for thought?
Damn Right!
