The irony of the SEO spam
There are many self-appointed WP “gurus” out there… and, usually, I don’t even bother noticing them and even less arguing with their nonsense teachings. It’s unfair to argue with somebody whose knowledge is so minimal that is laughable.
Next, as my earlier posts can prove it, I don’t engage in personal attacks. This post will be no exception, either: I don’t have anything with the people, only with the methods and publicly available statements.
One more thing, before we discuss the comments from my Spam folder. I consider all the hype around SEO (search engine optimization) to be voodoo science, to say the least. Make no mistake, I do think and do believe there are certain common sense settings and methods to help search engines finding and properly indexing your web pages (including WordPress sites). I just dismiss all that “hocus-pocus” promoted by SEO-products sellers and shady SEO-services that want you to think they are the best thing since the sliced bread. So, I might be biased against SEO plugins promising all that BS but I’ve never said anything publicly against them. Till now.
The reason for posting this is a new WP plugin, called SEOPressor. More exactly the methods used for promoting it and the contradiction with its promises.
No, I am not going to link to it. It is claiming that it can promote your website to position number one in Google search result pages (SERP). Maybe, maybe not. I am not going to analyze the mistakes promoted by the plugin, like the obvious lack of knowledge about semantic HTML coding when it comes about headings… That’s beyond my point.
However if it is so powerful that it can be used on any WordPress site to get on page #1 in the search engines, then why do that promoters of the plugin, both the original site owners and their affiliates need to post spam comments on my blog to get some backlink juice?
Isn’t it ironic? Here is a script (tool, software, plugin) and its sales page and video states it can help you to get on page #1 in SERP… yet, instead of using it to do what it says, they all go around and post spam comments on WP related blog posts.
Some of the spam comments link directly to the sales page, others to affiliates’ pages. I don’t really care where they point, since all of the comments ended up in the spam. (Yes, Akismet is doing a good job.) It happens that sometimes I look at the spam comments, either out of curiousity or because they are flagged as “pending”. Well, no more ‘pending’ — they are clearly spam.
A side note for the affiliates: any decent marketer promotes only products that they bought, tried and are convinced it works. Which means, if you bought the product, put it to work and it does what the sales page says… you don’t need to spam my blog because you are on position #1 in the SERP, aren’t you?
You should click on the image above: it’s a screenshot taken of my spam comments with all the links highlighted!
Final thought to all the WP/SEO gurus out there: you can create and sell whatever magic product you come up with, I don’t care. If you can sell it, go for it… Just stop spamming my blog! Otherwise I will go publicly after you, as I did above.
9 Responses to “The irony of the SEO spam”
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Tim on September 9th, 2011
Istvan,
You did say I should comment and now I’m commenting! Just read through your mail and I was so curious. I must say you really did a good job with your email.
About the post, I wonder why people’ll spam blogs for a product that claims to get my blog to the front page of google. Isn’t that funny? Really, it’s trash. If I see something like that on my blog, I’ll kick the product/plugin if it’s promoted to me. I believe in “do as I say just as I do” not “do as I say not as I do”.
Once again Istvan, thanks for the heads up and please it’ll be great if for every post you write here you sent a mail out informing us. Thanks again.
Tim
Istvan Horvath on September 9th, 2011
Thanks for visiting and commenting, Tim!
I am glad you liked the broadcast email and the post, as well. Believe it or not, there were a few subscribed, double optin individuals, who complained about the email being “spam”… Oh well, the stupidity has no limits
Re: sending out mail for new posts… I might consider doing it; in the meantime you can subscribe to the RSS feeds (bottom right, in the footer)
DianaHeuser on September 9th, 2011
Hi Istvan,
Thank you for the honest review of that plugin. I am really that I found your blog
Di
schazz on September 9th, 2011
Thanks for the great info on upcoming possible WP changes, and this stuff re SEOPressor is pretty hilarious…and sad.
WebCulture on September 10th, 2011
Well done Istvan
It’s time people say it the way it is and clean up the IM community a bit.
When Istvan say something about WordPress, I listen.
PS do you sometimes find legitimate comments in your Akismet spam folder?
regards
Mario Bruneau
Eric Sterling - Internet Marketing on September 15th, 2011
Hi Istvan,
There are certainly many creative ways to combat spam, call it out, etc. You may have seen recently a WSO plugin that takes spam comments and publishes them, but rather than show the original link it substitutes one of your own links (e. g. affiliate link if you want for a product related to the topic).
What is your opinion on something like that? It seems that people want to “hit back” at spammers, but I would doubt that anyone ever actually clicks through on the links, plus it makes the blogs seem un-maintained.
Istvan Horvath on September 15th, 2011
Occasionally, I make a “joke” deleting manually the spammer’s URL (if otherwise the comment sounds like a genuine one) and replace it with another domain of mine…
But to use a plugin to do this systematically – I don’t know. As you said, those meaningless stupid comments even with my own or aff links would just look messy and the blog neglected.
Scott on September 21st, 2011
How ironic that is. The plugin only does on page SEO anyway. I don’t know how they can claim it alone will get a page to rank.
Carlos on November 27th, 2011
Hi Istvan,
It’s Carlos (from the Warrior Forum). In addition to what you said Istvan…it wouldn’t be good to use a WP plugin to automatically replace affiliate links with one’s own as Google might wrongly come to associate your URL with spam.
Google recognizes spam not just by URL but also by the semantics, grammar used, and other factors that are outside the URL itself.
It might label the comment as spam anyway (with our without the affiliate URL left intact) and it may come to associate your URL (if you replace the affiliate with such) as spam…which you don’t want.
Just my two cents to add to the discussion.
By the way I would have signed up to receive notice of new posts from your blog Istvan but I find RSS to be a waste of time for me in that in the long run my RSS feed gets too full such that I end up ignoring what is coming into it.
Generally speaking I greatly prefer signing up by email and receiving notice of new posts by email. That way I can easily unsubscribe from any one thing that I no longer want to get not to mention that I actually pay attention to what I get notice of if it is contained in a regular email than I am if it becomes one of a number of RSS feeds that I may receive.
Carlos