How Not To Be a SEO Spammer 65
An anonymous reader writes "The head of Google's webspam team, Matt Cutts, has blogged about one of his colleagues receiving an email offering SEO services to help the web site www.google.com. The irony wasn't lost on Matt, who has blogged about these emails before. As this article points out, if ever there was evidence that the people who send many of these emails haven't done their homework, this is it."
This page should have more comments (Score:5, Funny)
It would make it rank higher organically with search engines.
Re:This page should have more comments (Score:5, Funny)
I will send you my bill for this comment.
Re:This page should have more comments (Score:5, Informative)
It would make it rank higher organically with search engines.
Well, here's one....
I had to go look up 'SEO' as I was drawing a blank on it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There, now I have some idea what the article is about.
Maybe someone could optimize editors on /. to make sure all acronyms are spelled out at least once in the article.
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Because everyone on /. is a web marketer, developer, or designer?
Re:This page should have more comments (Score:4)
Because everyone on /. is a web marketer, developer, or designer?
Because the term is used everywhere, all the time.
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Because everyone on /. is a web marketer, developer, or designer?
Because the term is used everywhere, all the time.
Well, dang, there's a first class assumption and exaggeration right there, no wonder we can't get good editors around this joint: Low expectations!
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Because everybody is a spam recipient (Score:2)
Yes, SEO is a business term. The technical term for it is "lying to search engine robots so they'll tell people your page is more interesting than it actually is."
There are other people who can help make your web site more interesting, or make it more accessible to search engine robots. Most of those people call themselves web designers or editors or content specialists or people who've spent 15 minutes reading Google's advice.
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Well, dang, there's a first class assumption and exaggeration right there, no wonder we can't get good editors around this joint: Low expectations!
Both editors and users have responsibilities. I am well-known to have long railed against slashdot's "editors", often putting the word in quotes as to the left so as to drive my point home — no doubt childishly in the eyes of some. Which is ironic, because the "editors" do their work with crayon. But as a user of a site about technology news, you are responsible for familiarity with common acronyms which relate to technology. The internet may be mankind's greatest achievement, and we discuss internet
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Please sell us more.
I do SEO by creating original unique content and using meta tags. Not really something you can sell. If someone wants some articles written, they could talk to me about that.
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Because the term is used everywhere, all the time.
SEO, seo seo seo. Seoseo seoseoseo seo seo seo seeeeeeooooo. Seoseo...?
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Invalid assumption. [xkcd.com]
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Maybe someone could optimize editors on /. to make sure all acronyms are spelled out at least once in the article.
If this was some common newspaper, then yeah, it could be good idea. However, you should assume readers of Slashdot to be familiar with industry's (and general, like DNA and CEO) common acronyms on at least "I know what it is about" level.
Where I got my degrees it was driven into us to Spell Out anything we were going to refer to later in a written article, followed by the acronym in parenthesis. In longer works it would be included in a glossary in the appendix. This must seem foreign now, this concept of Technical Writing. The practice saved readers from having to mark their reading material and go seek out an explanation.
I haven't seen an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) email in ages as I have a pretty good spam filter these days. H
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Well, things must have changed a lot in the ten years since I let my domains lapse. All I did was provide good content and link buddies, and a search for "quake" always had me close to the top of the results in all the engines.
You only need SEO if your site sucks. Nobody will come unless they have a reason. The best SEO is lots of people actually wanting to come to your site.
Re:This page should have more comments (Score:4, Insightful)
The real LOL is that the department heads think spammers/scammers "do homework".
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Let me go check Alta Vista for the address for this... bing
trust me (Score:3, Insightful)
SEO is like Voodoo in some sense. It's not measurable because there's too many factors outside your control.
Is there traffic because the SEO is awesome, or is there traffic anyways. No one knows.
The only thing an SEO can say for sure is that we can make the proper on-site changes. Without ever
mentioning the word traffic - because that leads to false hopes.
Re:trust me (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's mostly snake oil, but there is something to be said for properly implemented schema.org tags, well formed page names, and the rest of the stuff that makes your site not only bubble higher in the search results, but also provide useful links within your search results.
And by the way, you can indeed quantify SEO improvements. The only problem is that the SEO guy usually doesn't know how and ends up asking a developer anyway.
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How is it not measurable, you either go up or down in relevant search results. Anyway amusing as this story is, I have a hunch that almost all of the SEO spam has nothing to do with SEO, but is rther people trying to social engineer access to servers for viral distribution purposes.
I guess they saw Google.com's bing rating? (Score:3)
It is true, that searching for other search engines is a favorite way your average end user utilizes to access other search engines. So Google's SEO / ranking across other search engines is pretty important.
(Obviously; this is essential to their core business, and they won't leave this to an outside contracter )
Well, there is some logic to it. (Score:2)
If you search for "web search" on Google, you get some "websearch.com" as top result, then wiki entry on web search, then Yahoo and lots of other shitty/scammy looking pages like mywebsearch, Google is nowhere in sight.
Searching for "search" gives, in order, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter's search, search.com, Dogpile, Wikipedia and even AOL. Google's search is on second page.
Damn right they can't SEO for shit!
PS: Searching for "search" on Bing gives Google as top detailed result with links to subsites.
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If you google google google is 3rd. :)
Re:Well, there is some logic to it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then they give good results. If I use a search engine to search for search engines, I'm not interested in the search engine I'm searching with to show in the search results, as I found that one already. So that's six searches in one sentence :-)
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Oh, FFS! Everyone knows you do not, under any circumstances, google Google! Don't do it, the internet itself will collapse in a recursive that will never reach its stop condition. You have been warned! Don't do it!
That used to be the case, but I heard Google's MapReduce engine finally came up with an answer; google for google, and the answer will be 42
Or rather, "Search instead for googol"
News for nerds, stuff that matters (Score:5, Funny)
Next up: Slashdot reveals that some of those billionaire Nigerian princes aren't actually real!
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I think it would be far more shocking if Slashdot would reveal that some of those billionaire Nigerians *are* actually real.
Now wouldn't that throw a spanner in the spammer.
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Of course some of them are real! I got an email from one promising me 10% cut on $5bn he was trying to pass on to a relative in my country, and so I said to myself "whatever, I got nothing anyway, so let's just go for it" and he did good on his promise! Now I'm rich and you can be too! Just send me your credit card details and I'll pass them on to the same guy who send me all that money...
Props, though. (Score:5, Funny)
The spammer managed to get ahold of a real human inside Google. No small feat.
Re:Props, though. (Score:5, Funny)
This is a non-story (Score:3)
I *suppose* you could add a filter to the spambot, but really why? There are only a handful of search engines, and I'm sure the admins have really good spam filters, so you don't gain a whole lot by excluding them.
so i got an SEO phone call.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I told them that when I needed SEO I would search for it and whichever company ranked highest would get the call.
Maybe he can raise Google's ranking on Bing? (Score:2)
Maybe the SEO guy wants to help Google get a higher ranking on Bing, Baidu, etc.? I mean, I just googled "Web Search" on Bing and Google was #7 on the list. That's not good!
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Lol, God help the person who needs help from other search engines to discover the existence of Google.
I'm disappointed that no one responded to my use of "google" as a verb when describing searching on Bing to find Google.
gmail are evil (Score:1)
Oh the irony of google and spam. Gmail is the biggest contributor to spam in a different way. They refuse to shutdown the gmail accounts created in their 100,000's each week, which are used to register on forums and blogs that require email activation. just check out stopforumspam.com and you will see that gmail domains total more than the rest of the top 100 spam domains combined. Gmail abuse reporting is pathetic, as are the people at gmail that make the decisions.
well this is coincidence (Score:4, Funny)
so google gets an offer for SEO, and shortly thereafter google just happens to appear on slashdot?
I guess they opted for the budget package.
Google Needs It (Score:2)
This Google insider obviously doesn't understand the problem.
I did a Google search for "google", and the Google homepage showed up 7th on the list (under some news articles and links to Maps and Analytics). Clearly Google doesn't know what they're doing, and needs to use better SEO so that Google will rank them higher.
The bottom line is - if Google showed up higher in the Google search results, more people would use Google.
Why it's unnecessary (Score:2)