Clyde on Spam

Actual June number. Click to enlarge.

Actual June number. Click to enlarge.

Spammers are not new to M3. In fact, the spam filters keep more than 3,000 comments per month from my sight, while Akismet blocks as many as 10-20,000 per month. Clyde is a vegetarian, so what do you think he has to say about spam?

Old School

There are tomes dedicated to spam of the old nature. You have seen them. Chances are good in your early days you may have even approved some of them.

Great post! Keep them coming!”

It has been awhile since you posted anything like this. I will add you back to my reader.”

This is great informations! I will share this with my brother since he is looking for this exact thing.”

The grammar tip offs were plenty, or at least we noticed there was no way to truly attach the comment to the post on which it was attached.

These were interspersed with the bootleggers selling knock-off or stolen Nike or Jordan shoes and Louis Vuitton or Coach bags who commented on Wordless Wednesday posts.

Second Gen

number 2Next came the Google Translate spammers. Theirs were always obvious. You could not massacre your own language that badly without a cabin in the Appalachian mountains, eight missing front teeth and a nickname of Bubba on embossed on the back of your belt.

These trolls were automated just the way the Old Schoolers were.

New Wave

Enter the spammers of the future: The Scrapers. Scrapers take text from your own website and post it as comments. Worse still, they take text from websites about your posts and copy their content into your comment box.

When they have a blog which is not suspended for TOS violations of the platform, they are normally in a language different from your blog. Their content is about what is considered “SEO gold”: exchange rates, stock market futures, dating sites.

Enter Ape

Right turn, Clyde.

Right turn, Clyde.

Considering anyone with reading skills can learn the SEO tactics of the late ’90s are useless now, why would anyone attempt them, solicit content which adheres to them and/or think property owners would allow their tactics to stand on legitimate sites?

1. The old schoolers were just looking for a profile link to their sites to lure your readers to check them out. Relatively harmless.

2. The second generation were doing the same thing and looking to get you to help them guarantee their clients X,XXX links back to their websites, thus creating link juice for client sites from American-registered, PR1 or higher domains.

3. The new wave is doing all of the above while harming the comment site more than just by allowing spam. The plagiarized content costs the host site in terms of page rank, SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and original content. Plagiarism is forbidden the world over.

Why?

Why do people insist on harming the competition when they are incapable of standing their own ground and producing a website surfers will actually visit? More importantly, why is it so difficult to play by the rules?

It is enough to make an ape wonder.


Do you know what the rules are (or were)? Have you ever been asked to write “SEO” copy? What makes people cheat? Are ethics really so difficult to have?

Hashtags: #SEO #spam #ethics

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24 Comments

  1. Gads, I wouldn’t know SEO anything if I tripped over it.
    Why are so many turkeys spammers? I don’t see the point although you did explain why.
    Tess Kann recently posted..Coming Soon, but When?My Profile

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    • Despite my ability to point it out on the map, I simply cannot get there from here. I am still rather overwhelmed by the fact there are thousands of web pages devoted to the truth as opposed to millions touting, providing and selling the wrong way. xxx

      Reply

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