SEO Spam

If you run a blog on WordPress, chances are you’ve gotten the spam comment that starts “Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors” and goes on to tell you what, in this person’s humble opinion, you’re screwing up, following all of it with an offer to watch a video about what their amazing plugin will do to improve pages hits and blah blah blah. Save your time: I clicked the link, and it didn’t bring me to a page with anything whatsoever to do with improving search engine optimization. It took me to a page that was pushing one of those get-rich-quick schemes where you can’t leave the page unless you leave your name and email address, no doubt so they can send you hundreds of emails like normal spammers do.

Uh, guys, word of advice: WordPress.com, which hosts this blog, doesn’t allow its users to install third-party plugins like the one you claim to talk about in a video somewhere. To the best of my knowledge, neither does Blogger, TypePad, or any of the other blog-hosting sites. You’re wasting your time. And, exactly how do you suppose that constantly dumping these spam comments on me gives me any confidence that your plugin will do anything close to what you’re promising and that it won’t unleash a virus that will eat my blog and infect every computer that visits?

Search engine optimization was a big thing a few years ago. The trick is to set up keywords both on your site and in your HTML that will result in your site showing up on the first page of a Google search. There are any number of ways to do this, among them looking at the most-frequently used keywords on sites like yours and using as many of them as you can to achieve the highest position possible. Kind of like I talked about during the A to Z Challenge, where companies would add strings of A’s in front of their names so they’d would be listed first in their category in the Yellow Pages (e.g. A AAA AAAAAA AAAAAAAAA Roy’s Termite Service).

Understand, SEO is a legitimate concern, and if your business depends on being listed at or toward the top of a Google search, you need to pay attention to it. At the same time, Google is messing with their algorithm almost constantly, and what gave you a high position on Google pages once upon a time is not guaranteed to give you the same ranking in the future. Google will also look at the location the request is coming from and what you’ve looked for and linked to in the past (yeah, they keep statistics on that, too) before giving you results. If your primary concern is page ranking, you might be wasting your time. And the search engines are getting wise to spamdexing, and actually penalizing sites for doing it. The way you talk in your spam messages, I can tell your plugin relies heavily on spamdexing. Why would I give you money to be penalized by Google and the other engines?

So, guys? I’m not interested.

Now to take on the people on Twitter who are willing to sell me 5,000 followers for the low, low price of just $19.95…