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Stupid blog tricks and other SEO foolery

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 21, 2007 in Web spam

If you think you have heard everything good that SEOs, would-be SEOs, and spammers can say about blogs, think again. You’re in for a summer full of blog spam, nonsense, SEO quackery, and loads of great ideas for links that should drive any sane person to hit the delete key.

You see, a while back we were travelling down the yellow brick road and … oops, wrong movie.

It’s about this blog stuff, see? Blogs have been around for quite a while now and people are just beginning to realize that blogs can do everything that, oh, an average ordinary Web site can do. Except blogs make it easy to do almost everything a Web site can do, except for the Web site stuff that blogs can’t do. See?

Okay, let me make this perfectly clear. Ask not what your blog can do for you. Rather, ask what your neighbor is doing with his blog.

Clear as mud? Of course. So let me start at the beginning…no, that would take too long. Prince Humperdink is going to marry Princess Buttercup, but…oops, wrong movie.

All right, Sparky, you’ve convinced me that it’s time for some straight talk.

And I’m talking about blog spam, of course. Now the easy stuff is easy to recognize, see? Someone signs up for Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts and has those alerts sent to an auto-post email address for a Blogger or Wordpress blog (or maybe some other type of blog). So you see all these little search alert snippets in blogs that last maybe as long as it takes to drink a thimbulfull of water (how do you spell thimbul anyway?).

So any idiot who hates Javascript ads can recognize the easy blog spam pretty easily. But it’s the tougher blog spam that is harder to spot. And I’m not talking about autogenerated mishmash that came out of some spammer’s LSD-enhanced database. I’m talking about the human-written stuff.

Some of the text link brokers are already offering “dedicated posts” with “undetectable relevant links”. How do they work? Why, you pay someone to write a dedicated blog post that contains one embedded link to the Web page of your choice. Pretty smart, eh? No one would think that a blog that only carries posts that each have only one link would be a spam blog, would they?

I mean, a series of unrelated blog posts that in no way make reference to the blogger, his or her life, some theme, past blog posts, friends, friends’ blogs, etc. — that doesn’t in any way look suspicious and detectable, does it? I didn’t think so, either.

Now, dedicated blog posts — who would ever have thought of something like that? After all, they’re on blogs, so they cannot possibly be signpost pages or anything goofy like that, right? After all, the blog is probably covered with ads anyway. So it will probably look normal.

But maybe what people need to do is be really sneaky and crafty. Instead of buying dedicated blog posts, why not simply trade them? Hey, you can drop by your friends’ blogs and write a quick post that helps make their blogs more interesting and then, hey!, drop a link back to your favorite site. Who would notice that you’re this week’s guest blogger on 50 blogs? It’s not like anyone would organize such a thing, right? And you’d never sign up for a service where you could post on 50 blogs at once, would you?

Link spam is still link spam. You don’t have to say it’s a bad thing, but if you believe that making the links bigger by surrounding them with more text will fool the search engines, you’re only mostly right. Being mostly right is sort of like being mostly dead. If you’re only mostly right then you must be only partly wrong, and mostly is always more than partly. It says so in the script.

Good spammers will stay ahead of the curve and start trying out new ideas before other people share those ideas in blogs and forums. By the time the ideas catch on with the general SEO community, the spammers are already well-positioned in the search results. And what decent self-respecting spammer can resist the temptation of building relevant text for relevant links? After all, every SEO forum and blog tells you to get relevant links, right?

Blog spam has not yet peaked. In fact, it has only begun to appear on the radar screen. Now many of us have seen spam blogs before, but blog spam is not a spam blog. Do you see how that works? Blog spam doesn’t come from spammy blogs. It’s not going to be found on autogenerated blogs. It’s not going to be surrounded by more Javascript ads than there are words in the blog post. The whole point of blog spam, sadly, is to encase a link in algorithmically acceptable text.

What a waste of perfectly good content.

People who have no idea of what they are doing will be writing passionate blog posts to distribute across 50 other blogs so that they can obtain 50 posts for their own blogs. A good spam service will set up a system that lets the bloggers embed markers so that each blog can customize its 50 duplicate posts with search-and-replace. No search engine could possibly figure out such a system, right?

What would be really cool is to contribute one article a week to a “universal RSS feed” that is posted on only one blog. Each post will be dutifully archived and linked to by the blog so it will look perfectly natural. You get the link and Mr. AdSpammer gets lots of free content for his Long Tail Chasing MFA site.

Bloggy spam is not so much a possibility as actually already here, if only in someone’s heart. People will try these ideas, have tried these ideas, and may already be making money off of them. After all, many forum operators have been inviting complete strangers to build up their indexable content to assist with search engine rankings for years. So who cares if every thread is loaded with intrusive Javascript ads? It’s a small price (paid in inconvenience) to pay for the privilege of helping someone else achieve multiple search engine placements.

Through comments blogs have become the new forums. But through interactive blogs, where bloggers respond to each other through their carefully placed posts, everyone will get links, no one will be able to link drop, and search engines won’t know that the community effort is really just being put together for the sake of building links.

There are already plenty of blog puppets out there blogging away in slavish fashion, seeking to build up link popularity. Blog puppets are hard to identify because they tend to be more focused and speak with a dedicated voice. But blog puppetry is inefficient and doesn’t behoove everyone.

So what is an honest business owner to do when someone calls up and offers to build links to their site through dedicated blog posts, natural blog networks, and sophisticated blog placement strategies? After all, the media says that blogs are king and everyone had better have a blog. But no one has time to write their own blog.

To all of which I can only say, “Well, Samwise, what do you think of the Elves now?”