'spamfighting' Category

• Duplicate Content, And Blog Spammers

  Around half the people I talk to, about Search Engine Optimisation, are terrified of duplicate content on their own websites. But 80% or more of the spam that I see, is massively duplicated. Why do real site owners, with valuable content but multiple paths to it, fear duplicate penalties from Google, but spammers who endlessly [...]

  February 28th, 2010

• Search Engine Spam Reduction Through The DMCA

  Google will act to remove web pages that rank highly, that use copyrighted material without permission. One of the more popular tactics for a beginner Search Engine Optimiser, is to copy material that already ranks well. Apart from the ethical dimensions of copying someone elses’ work, there’s this:

  The technique of copying already well ranking content [...]

  February 17th, 2010

• Search Engine Optimisation - Site Submission Solicitations

  The incubator that we work in, has a bunch of small businesses, with varying degrees of proficiency with the web. Every so often, we run a seminar for them on building web presence. One of the questions that is likely to come up at the end, will be about search engine submission. Our neighbouring businesses [...]

  February 16th, 2010

• Buzz spam - it’s started

  Yay! You knew it would happen…

  February 15th, 2010

• SEO: Remember relevance?

  Inspired by a great piece of spam this morning. This looks like a lengthy and individually crafted posting, offering a summary of what looks like the current situation on H1N1 in the USA. The problems? Well, it is targeting a US dentist, and the spam was contributed to an article about how Google has been [...]

  February 5th, 2010

• Google. Foot. Gun. Shoot.

  The AdWords Help Forum has degenerated over the last year or so, into a customer service forum. I intend to cover that in detail some other time. The common signatures of pain in the forum are:

  Complaints that “Google won’t accept my Credit Card“
  Making promo vouchers work
  Suspension for various reasons, often involving guaranteed ways to make [...]

  February 4th, 2010

• Search Engine Optimisers, Spam and Reputation Management

  I detest spam. I don’t like it in my email. I don’t like it on websites and reading the spam dropped into blog comments leaves me feeling tainted. I’m also involved in online reputation management for a few clients, and spam that involves the clients’ name can be very hard to work with. This issue [...]

  June 17th, 2009

• Bing Spamming Twitter?

  Although I registered for Twitter about a year ago, I’ve only begun seriously using it since late last year. I’m interested in how Bing has been faring, and to reply to a question in the AdWords Help Forum, I remembered that I’d seen one of the people I follow, mentioning the full path to Bing [...]

  June 5th, 2009

• SEO, IIS case folding filenames, Spiders, Analytics, and Robots.Txt

  AFAICS, the best way to administer IIS for SEO purposes, seems to be to run screaming from the room and hide under a desk until you are allowed to use Apache. So many of the default behaviours create difficulties for users or SEO. Yes, I’ve been continuing to dig into web analytics and IIS web [...]

  August 20th, 2008

• IIS Cookieless Generates Spider Crawling Problems

  Another case of Web Server Log File Analysis on IIS being disturbed by bots, having the potential for SEO naughtiness and spamming the search engines. The problem is created by IIS’s cookieless model. The idea appears to be to present a unique string in the path so you can track sessions without needing a cookie. [...]

  August 18th, 2008