'spamfighting' Category

• 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 the [...]

  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 know all [...]

  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 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