SEO UPDATES

While browsing news from the past week, I found an article written by Cari Haus on WebProNews.com, titled “The Biggest SEO Scam of All”. Intrigued, I decided to read, and here’s what I found:

Read the rest of the article here, and in her own words, “beware of any SEO firm that:

• employs a boiler room full of telemarketers
• automates most or all of their services
• insists on gaining and retaining control of the url to be promoted
• focuses on lengthy and obscure search strings
• touts sites that are garnering a mere 100 hits per day as examples of their success.”

Everyone who wishes to employ the services of a SEO firm can indeed benefit from this advice, as it can be easy to fall for such ploys.

Moreover, I especially agree with Cari Haus on the 100 hits bit. I can do that myself without even having worked extensively on promoting my website and not being a specialist at SEO tactics. This is indeed a ridiculous promise!

… unless you have the legal budget to back it up.

Google Blogoscoped reported how SEO Inc. dropped out of Google’s rankings for virtually every SEO-related term, including their company name.

SEO Inc. fired back with a cease & desist notice.

Some people / companies will never learn.

After sending the cease & desist, Boing Boing eventually picked up the story.

A tiny little weblog post on a not-so-widely-read blog suddenly gets BoingBoing’d after getting the lawyers involved, and probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers now have a negative impression of SEO Inc.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book tackles Ethical SEO in this article.

A quote (from an email he received):

I think when people talk about ethics in business they are concerned about someone cutting into their profits or threatening their profits. It has nothing to do with human rights or suffering (which is wrong). Either way, business people will continue to talk about ethics all day - even while they own sweat shops - because sweat shops have very little to do with ethics.

Definitely worth a read. I like Aaron’s contrarian thinking.

Just to extend the line of reasoning from the article (so that we’re all on the same page), these are a few statements of fact that can also be made:

• Hitler was ethical
• Killing babies is ethical
• Genocide is ethical
• Comment Spam, Email Spam, DNS Hijacking, Stealth Spyware Installation, etc etc is all very very ethical

Why? Because (just going off this article) ethics is a tautology defined by you. Whatever you say is ethical, is, well, ethical. Or to quote Mr. Wall:

The people who push the ethics concept, are by default, ethical.

This was my favorite quote from the article:

Search engine spam is not the same as email spam or blog comment spam as you are not directly immediately wasting some persons time.

I love that: “directly immediately”

I’m actually not finding fault here, just picking apart the words…

So… is it okay if I’m only indirectly immediately wasting someone’s time. Or what if I’m directly, but not immediately wasting someone’s time?

Aaron - here’s all we (speaking for anyone with a weblog and comments turned on) are asking:

Do you, Aaron Wall, think that using blog comment spam (as a technique) is unethical?

That is, from your own code of ethics that you wake up with, make money with, live and breath, everyday.

If not, I think people should start linking to you with the phrase: ethical comment spammer

…as a joke

Update: Aaron responds -

>ethical comment spammer
I actually have not done anything like that in a while. feel free to link up though

Glad to see Aaron hasn’t gone to the dark side of SEO.

Duncan Riley outs a comment spammer (Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com) over on blog herald:

Duncan Riley> Whilst digging for my last post I also discovered an SEO who is not only using comment spam on blogs as a tool, but is actually soliciting for new comment spamming scripts using Freelancing sites.

(Drum roll please) And the SEO is: Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com.

Now its one thing to be unscrupulous enough to spam blogs in the pursuit of search engine traffic, but it takes a particular level of stupidity to advertise for someone to write you a new script as Amy has done at Get A Freelancer.com.

If you follow the link you’ll also disturbingly find that there are quite a few offers from programmers willing to help her in her comment spamming ways.

So who is Amy Cross, if that is indeed her or his real name? Well the whois information provides little use, with the contact details being held from public view. On her site she describes her self as follows: “Amy has been recognized as an effective leader who is in tune with her client needs and has one of the single highest customer satisfaction and consumer confidence ratings ever recorded”. For somebody so well known I cant even find her on Google.

We do know however that the site is hosted on marketrends.net, a Sacramento based hosting company. So if we don’t know who Amy is, we do know a little about one of her customers, who provides a customer reference to Amy right on the front page, and guess what products they are flogging…..if you guessed cialis you’d be right! So Joe Hopkins of genbucks.com, come on down! But you know, for some strange reason these comment spammers don’t want to be found because Joe also uses a cloaking company for his domain registration, and even the dns for his host is cloaked.

So a dead end for now, but none the less the world is hopefully a slightly better place for the exposure of this comment spamming scum. Have a nice weekend!

Amy Cross - you’re busted!

How would you like to plead to the court of public opinion?

A service that can be used to help limit the fraud that seems to be growing in the Pay-Per-Click world.

New Service Helps Stop Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud

PPC Trax released to the general public to help track and stop PPC click fraud, improve PPC advertisers’ conversion rates and improve PPC Return-On-Investment (ROI).

[ClickPress, Mon Feb 21 2005] Chandler, AZ - February 21, 2005 - PPC Trax has announced the beta release of it’s highly anticipated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tracking and auditing service at http://www.ppctrax.com/ .

With the billion dollar PPC industry still growing at 20% per year, new advertisers come into the market daily. New and long-time PPC advertisers with ad spend budgets from $200 to thousands
per day are being systematically defrauded of their marketing budgets.

Both groups of marketers and advertisers are clamoring for a solution to help prevent affiliates, publishers and competitors from stealing their ad budgets in the growing scheme.

PPC Trax is a monthly service that offers detailed click fraud tracking and reporting starting as low as $29.00 per month.

For a limited time, PPC Trax is offering free 30 day trial accounts to PPC advertisers.

“Clients and colleagues have been begging us to develop a simple to use but highly effective PPC tracking solution that can help detect and stop PPC click fraud as well as serve as the basis for
recovering refunds from pay-per-click search engines and media properties”, said Skip Pratt, General
Manager of PPC Trax.

“We decided to invest the capital and manpower realizing this gap in the market exists and there is a pent-up demand from marketers to make more effective use of their advertising budgets and to
cease fraud from occurring to them” Pratt continued.

Since the vendors who offer pay-per-click advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud, advertisers are now turning to third party click auditors such as PPC Trax.

PPC marketers and advertisers benefit from using the PPC Trax service by:

- Improving website lead generation and PPC sales conversion rates
- Maximizing profitable PPC ads faster
- Eliminating costly, non-performing PPC advertising
- Developing the perfect advertising mix for their website
- Identifying the most profitable keywords for their PPC campaign
- Eliminating failed PPC ads faster
- Detecting and document PPC click fraud
- Recoup fraudulent PC expenses from PPC search engines
- Identifying PPC competitors who may be draining their PPC budget
- Identifying IP addresses that are frequent clickers or fraudsters
- Monitoring click spikes that indicate fraudsters are on the march

The service offers each subscriber, whether small home-based businesses or large corporations:

- Track any filetype - .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .cfm, .cgi, .pl,
- Generous transactions per URL
- Transactions can be aggregated among URL’s
- IP address capture
- IP address geographic location
- User Agent (browser, bot etc.)
- Date and Time stamp
- Referring URL
- Email alerts
- IP address history
- Custom reports

In addition, PPC Trax is offering “recovery based” click fraud services using it’s online and staff services. PPC Trax shoulders the risk of refunds from the PPC search engine and performs all the labor to prepare and submit refund requests. This service has certain requirements. Contact the company at the website below for more information.

PPC Trax is offering a limited-time, free 30 day PPC click fraud tracking account. The free trial offer is a full function account. There are no further commitments required.

To improve your PPC sales conversion ratios and improve PPC return-on-investment, visit www.ppctrax.com

About PPC Trax
PPC Trax provides real-time click fraud and web advertising tracking, auditing and recovery services for it’s small, medium and large corporate clients. For more information, see the company website at:
www.ppctrax.com

Here are a few guidelines suggested by MSN to help you out. First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best ‘keywords’ should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the “keywords meta tag” will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.

Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbot’s ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And here’s a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.

MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together. This point is not made entirely clear, but it should be of enough concern to have every SEO firm scampering to measure their clients web site’s index pages, just in case. In actuality, a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.

An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb. This may cause some web sites to need a complete redesign. Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed. This is very similar to the rules from other major search engines, as it provides somewhat of a safeguard against sites that stuff keywords in an attempt to fool or “spam” the engines into thinking they are something they are not. Redirects will not be read either.

Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot’s equation. They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness. Very interesting. Larger web sites may have a problem adhering to this rule, but it should be kept in mind that the MSNBot is still feeling its way through the web. A three deep scenario is probably the beginning of the parameter. It will surely offer a deeper crawl as it becomes more sophisticated.

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The following was posted on 3/22/05 to this thread:

Good Day All,

We are a marketing firm specializing in Online Gaming & Poker and are looking to hire a Senior(if possible) Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Specialist/Manager.

We would prefer to have a local candidate, or someone who comes from Ontario or Canada, but relocation is an option if absolutely necessary.

Rusty, Danny, and other Moderators, any ideas on how and where I can find Toronto based SEO’s looking for work?

If anyone is interested - Please PM me..

Cheers

Critter