'spamfighting' Category

• Google Hates Undeclared Paid Backlinks

  Tuesday, a client sends me an email asking if they should take advantage of an offer to buy a page on a directory on which they can create links. It’s accompanied by the email soliciting business, which includes a story about how a couple of businesses benefited, and the prices for pages at different tiers [...]

  October 1st, 2011

• Experimental Results: Blog Spammers Do Target Comments

  I said that I’d be testing whether I had substantially reduced blog spamming on this blog’s articles, by changing the string that announced where to leave a comment or response to an article. The first thing to check is whether this blog, post-Caffeine and post-Panda, is still substantially where it used to be in search [...]

  May 22nd, 2011

• Google Sidewiki Made More Obvious – But Still a Tech Not A Benefit

  The Sidewiki, introduced almost a year ago, looked like an interesting tool and a way to allow users to interact with a site without on-site commentary enabled. Accessed via an unobtrusive button in the Chrome browser or via a Google Toolbar, it was all but completely invisible to most users, and rarely used. This new [...]

  September 5th, 2010

• Blog Spammers Target Blogs

  Hardly news, but people who spam blogs, use search to look for them. So is there anything that can be done to reduce the attractiveness of a blog to spam? Have a look at this recent sample of keywords that lead to this blog, taken from Google Analytics. Spot anything? Yup, a large fraction of [...]

  April 8th, 2010

• SEO: Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate

  I’m going to take issue with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. I think his most recent White Board Friday video is just plain wrong. Normally, I have a lot of respect for what SEOmoz does, but I think the advice and implications are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. How Does Google Rank Results I don’t [...]

  March 26th, 2010

• 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 [...]

  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