In years past, I'd occasionally post about various aspects of webspam - manipulative links, cloaking, thin content, etc. In these posts, I'd use examples I'd seen - sometimes particularly egregious ones, other times more subtle offenders - both to help illustrate the points and to provide concrete evidence. It's hard to say "link spam is a big problem and Google's susceptible to it," without specific data to help back up that point, and it's much easier to brush aside generic statements than observable cases.
This came to a halt several years ago as a segment of the public SEO community derided the practice as "outing" or "snitching," and used both public and private methods of pressure to lambast and ostracize those who engaged in public discussions of webspam with specific examples. Today, there's a few rare but useful examples of public webspam discussion that slip through the cracks, including:
- Yoast's recent post showing off GoDaddy's link building spam
- Matt McGee's great post pointing out abuses of video snippets
- Aaron Wall's own exposé of Mahalo's SEO tactics
Seeing these, I'm hopeful that our industry is becoming more professional, less paranoid and less like a mafia. These were always the features I hated most about the SEO world on the web - that we would rarely "come together" as a group to laud progress, embrace accomplishments or conduct research (though projects like the industry survey and search ranking factors, both ours and David Mihm's local version stand out in those arenas), but that groups would unite to antagonize or attack each other.
So, it was a fun coincidence this week when Aaron and I had a chat over Twitter on this very topic, which I've Storify'd below:
There were several things I really enjoyed and appreciated about our conversation:
- Despite the 140 character limit, it was (mostly) sensible :-)
- No one lost their temper or turned to personal attacks (which, unfortunately, hasn't always been the case in the past and for those times when I've played a part in that, I hope Aaron accepts my apology)
- The discussion included some humor and fun
- Both of us clearly have a lot of respect for one another and, despite arguing vehemently on this issue, maintain both an industry and personal kinship
The disagreement, at its core, seems to be around the impacts of open webspam discussion. I think those who engage in gray/black hat manipulation (or marketing of any kind for that matter) publicly on the web shouldn't expect privacy from their fellow marketers nor from the web community as a whole. Just as we learn by studying the launch of Spotify or the customer acquisition tactics used by Dropbox, so too can we learn from those who manipulate the sensitive parts of the search engines' algorithms. And, in doing so openly, I think we help separate our profession from the practice of spam and show the broader web community that we are not a mafia focused on silencing those who expose gray/black hat, but rather a diverse set of professionals who openly acknowledge and call out bad practices.
Aaron takes the other side, believing that the more standards are imposed (formally or informally), the less opportunity will exist for those who practice SEO. Many others have taken a stance that public webspam discussion is an offense worthy of some pretty horrific insults, and I've been on the receiving end of a large portion of those. It's, sadly, an issue that's created a lot of strife in the community, sometimes irreparably hurting relationships. I'm really glad to see that's not the case between Aaron and I, though :-)
Naturally, I'm curious about your perspective and, thus, have created a short survey below (anyone can view the results, and it's not particularly scientific given potential audience biasing):
While I look forward to reading some great comments, please keep in mind the sensitivity of this topic and the guidelines for posting on SEOmoz. We do remove comments that don't add positively to the discussion or show respect to other posters, and it's when topics are at their most volatile that we'd like for everyone here to be at their most TAGFEE.
For the people voting "Webspam should be open for public discussion in the marketing community", you should have required them to disclose their main websites for full and open scrutiny. Everyone wants to look inside everybody else's house, but are not so keen when it's their turn. I'd guestimate that we could find some form of webspam linking to them, whether they knew what it was or not.
I also disagree that outing each other would make the industry less like a mafia, because SEOs aren't the mafia. SEO is a symbiotic marketing channel reliant on Google, until the next big search engine/method comes along. In a mafioso analogy, Google would be the mafia - as they control the market. Removing all webspam wouldn't necessarily create better search results or a fairer market, as Google still decides who wins and who loses. The biggest winner being Google itself, the next level being their friends.
Secrecy is also the cornerstone of all marketing channels. Social Media for instance works in a similar way to SEO, except they have secret voting methods rather than secret linking methods. You don't see major social media companies outing a rival's voting methods, as it would shine a torch on their own methods. Even outside of marketing, McDonalds probably worked out KFC's magic blend of herbs and spices decades ago, but it's not in their best interest to tell everybody.
Outing webspam helps an SEO blog to keep their UVs up and their VCs happy. It helps a failing newspaper to appear modern and edgy, whilst allowing the contributor to launch a protection racket off the back of another company's misery. It helps Google cut out sites not playing by their rules, in favour of more commercially viable interests. It might even help less experienced SEOs learn about and adapt another website's SEO methods. What it doesn't do is help the searcher, nor the industry as a whole.
If you don't like a website ranking above you using "webspam", learn SEO and outrank it. It's as simple as that. If you can't outrank it, maybe you don't deserve to.
Also, what is defined as webspam? Even the most anal of SEOs have a very different opinion than Joe Public or even Google. Are directory submissions web spam? Paying for links? Bartering for links? Donating to charities that happen to link to you? Participating in forums that happen to link to you? Different people will say yes/no to all of these. I'd class some of them as spam and wouldn't use them. I wouldn't class the backlink profile of SEOmoz as clean at all! The only 100% clean website is one without any inbound links or outbound links. Bugger, where did my "web" go?!
If there is any outing to be done, it should be done by the clients of SEO agencies. Behind every bad SEO strategy is a bad SEO. So out the people, not the websites. I know a couple of big UK SEO agencies that are using very questionable techniques, but I'd never "out" their clients who don't know better. All we can do is try to educate the companies without publicly pointing fingers. Be prepared for the cross-examination though.
It's bizarre - when I was a full-time SEO, or at least managed a department of them, I would have been very nervous about outing people as you never know what will come back to bite you.
But now that I have little to do with SEO, I get tempted to 'out' a company when they spam my blog comments to sell their products.
Spam depends where you're standing I guess. That said, I've never been convinced that we should do Google's job for them, or that their definition of spam is necessarily the only one.
Outing each other will in fact make the industry more like a mafia. Imagine SEOs destroying each other business in the name of 'open web spam discussion'. No one will trust another and the whole industry will get a bad name. We should always remember that when you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back at you.
You make it sound like something unavoidable. You want to know how to avoid being outed yourself in a mafia-like society? Don't do black hat tactics yourself. It's as simple as that.
Fan-freakin'-tastic. This is a level of professionalism and openness that our industry needs in order to move foward. Being honest about our motives, findings, and competition helps us learn from each other, do more sustainable work, and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It's conceivable to me that "spam detection" could become its won sub-field of SEO/inbound marketing, much like site auditing, link profiling, social graphing, and other fields have sprung up in the past few years.
I have great respect for you and Aaron, esp. in light of your decision to talk about this aspect of our industry publicly on Twitter. And that in and of itself makes me think that another benefit of transparency here is that we'll be able to move SEO/inbound marketing from a perception of being seedy and dishonest to one that's respectable, valid, and data-driven.
Whether or not in-house folks are pencil-pushing, over-regulated, standardized automatons or not is their own decision - they're just as free to innovate and try new things as before, but will have additional accountability. Which is never, in my mind, a bad thing.
The question is less whether black hat and webspam are a good thing or not, but if Google is the unbiased and benevolent instance who shall make the rules. Google is a business and persuits its very own interestes, since it is aware of its market power with a lot of arrogance, aggresivity and obviously double standards. That was also Aaron's point, but seomoz has been missing the point completly in the last time.
I expect an SEO portal/community to focus on how stuff actually works/can work, not to propagate how the monopolist does it want to work. It is their risk of doing business if they decide for an algorithm, not ours. It is our risk however, to decide whether to stick to the rules or not. And it's not only about ethics but has several practical implications:
An SEO who never did a xrumer blast and consequently has no idea of what to expect of it in 2011 vs 2010 will do a poor a job both when analzing the SERPs fueled with backlinks not tracked by opensite explorer nor will he ever be able to recover a client site which has been vandalized by competitors, the previous "seo agency" or even to understand what's going on. Such an "SEO" is just not knowing the tools of trade used in the industry he is working in.
What's the limit for exact match anchor text? What's an acceptable link velocity? Never blew thousands of links out, varied and tested? I wouldn't pay a consultant who derives his knowledge just from reading other peoples blogs - especially in an industry which is all about a zero sum game. And like all crafts - no exercise, no experience.
Whats the impact of spun content? How much to spin or not to spin? Don't tell me you wanna manually write 300 author bios when securing social properties or to use the same all over again. Both means to waste your time and to rip your clients off.
Back to ethics: There are too many cases where the blackhat of today is the whitehat of yesterday. Not fucking suitable for a SEO company to make itself a mouthpiece of Google. Google is not good. It's a business.
Cheers
Hard to add anything to your comment...I can only parrot a "brilliant" and a "spot on." :)
After a minute of thinking...maybe the only bit I could add... would be that a lot of the worst forms of spam (in terms of volume & impact on users) are paid for by Google (content farms anyone?) and that as a casualty of fighting internal dysfunction inside Google (time to kill the content farms...but we can't take away their premium AdSense account that makes the business model possible), a lot of innocent webmasters who thought they were "playing by the rules" were still thrown under the bus by Google during the Panda update.
So even if you try to avoid risk you may still get smoked due to a side current that was unrelated to you. If by "playing by the rules" you still absorb the brunt of the risk, why not absorb some of the potential rewards as well?
Further adding salt in the wounds for those webmasters who were torched in the Panda update, it was recently revealed that Google is pre-paying Demand Media to create more "content" for Youtube.
First off, please humor any of my typing mistakes as I am writing this on my cell phone.
I believe at the heart of the outing debate is fairness. How do you discuss unscrupulous tactics in a manner that is respectful of those who may be unfairly harmed by that discussion? I think there are some clear questions and rules that should guide one's decision to "out".
1. Who will be harmed by "outing"? This is by far the most important question. Google's response to webspam outtings often leads to penalties greater than the advantage earned by the outted unscrupulous tactics. For businesses big and small this can mean jobs lost.
2. Who is responsible for the tactic? If the answer to this question is different than the answer to the question above, you need to do aome serious leg work before outing.
3. Should they know better? Never ascribe to malice what can be described by ignorance. In an industry where information is so skewed, young marketers are often swayed by solutions they had no reason to believe were considered black hat.
4. If they should know better, they are the responsible party, and they are the only ones who will be harmed, then in my opinion it is OK to out. If you do out, though, understand that the party injured by your action may choose to reciprocate.
5. If you are unsure of culpability, you should follow the standard procedure used by security vulnerability experts: disclose your findings to the responsible party and the individuals likely to be harmed. Explain your intent to write about the use of these techniques and that you are giving them a grace period to stop their use. You can also give them the opportunity to respond in your piece. Give a clear date of when you intend to go public with the information and do not stray from that date. As an SEO this can turn into an opportunity for a new client rather than a new enemy. I don't believe in some code of honor between thieves, I believe in common decency.
Finally, and most importantly, if you stand to gain in any way from the outing, strongly reconsider. Accept that your judgment may be biased by your self interest. If you still feel compelled to act, then ask another individual to take a look and decide whether to go live with that information and openly disclose you ana the source and the benedit you may gain from it.
A very wise overview there Russ.
Thanks Russ - BTW, I edited your comment to fix spelling/spacing issues.
With regards to point #1, I don't like the mentality that the first thing we think about as marketers is "who's being harmed by the webspam discussion?" INSTEAD OF "who's being harmed by the creation of webspam?"
It's my belief that spam and manipulation lead to a worse web, which leads to fewer happy searchers and users of the web, which leads to less commerce and business for all of us. I wish our industry would think bigger than the injured spammer. That said, appreciate your good points and deeper thinking in them.
Rand, the bigger discussion should be the age old one of....
.... what is spam?
Surely abusing any 3rd party web site, their infrastructure or "genetic make up" for your own advantage is spam.
On that basis all SEO, abusing the 3rd party site known as Google, is spam - despite what Matt says!
The barriers are clear.
If you can pass those 2 tests then it's game on!Here is an example of advertising that may well be illegal in many jurisdictions around the world but was amazingly succesful in the UK,mostly due to its shock value leading to over 1000 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEmA_QF30GI
https://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2010/7/Paddy-Power-plc/TF_ADJ_48797.aspx
It delivered, not only offline, but online and specifically in search too! Was it done for that reason? The ASA complaint was likely expected and likely taken into account as one of the benefits (links) for that campaign.
After adjudication by the ASA it was adjudged that it was within the law and rules set out. Would it have been legal and compliant in another jurisdiction? Probably not.
The test of spam is often intent of the person persuing the actions at the point of undertaking them, NOT the actions themselves.
Because this is nigh on impossible to measure, balance, record or understand then the overriding measure has to be law NOT your or anyone else's moral objections or considerations. I am pretty sure I could argue that much of what many so called WH SEOs do is spam and I could also argue that many BH SEOs do is not.
The truth is the name doesn't matter. As someone much wiser than me once wrote, "
Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself."
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Everyone :)
Jason -
I highly respect you and your opinions and what you do, but I have to disagree with your definition of spam. At best, I think it is simplistic. Spam is not using someone else's site for your own gain. Spam is using something else for your own gain and NOT ADDING VALUE, which I think is exactly what Rand is trying to get at.
If someone leaves me a comment on my site that is on-topic and adds value to the discussion, and leaves a link in there pointing to something they wrote on the same topic, I give them that link. SEOmoz gives them that link. It's adding value.
However, the 38,000 "comments" that my spam blocker has blocked are not adding value. They are just seeking to use my site for their own purposes and are not adding value. Also, I will fully admit that it is difficult, and sometimes seemingly impossible, to add value at scale. Quality does not scale well very often.
@aaron wall - I agree with you that Google would be on their own blacklist if they held themselves to their own standards, but I wouldn't say everything they did with eHow (and I don't know the financials, etc. If you do, please enlighten us) was bad. Sometimes eHow is the best result for a query. Often it is not, but sometimes it is. But do these trangressions mean they don't have a right to speak at all? No, it means they've made mistakes. Have you made mistakes with SEO in the past? I'm sure you have. If you held yourself to the standard you're holding Google to, you shouldn't be writing and commenting here.
*edit later* By the way, I do not mean this as a personal attack at all. If I held myself to my own standards, I'd be in the same boat. In fact, I'd wager that if we held anyone to their own standards, they would come up short. I'm just making the argument that we can't base the ability to have a voice, or make decisions, off of consistency.
John
I understand your views and kind of agree.
Let's spin it around though - Let's take those 38,000 comments that your spam blocker stopped and pretend for a moment that
Even though the links added value to the conversation wouldn't you still call this spam?
On that basis your argument falls apart and mine starts to stand up well - It is the intent of the action, at the time the action was undertaken, that is the arbiter of spam, not the action itself.
Let's also look at one of the reasons it could be argued that continuing the discussion around this topic is important, but mostly to one site more than any other. That point is well put by Rob Kerry at comment #jtc163233
I would indeed still call it spam, but only because it only meets most, but not all of the criteria. If the links all went back to pharma/dating sites, they cease to add value if the article or site they are linking to is not relevant to the conversation. It is about the intent, yes, but intent is not enough.
However, if the conversation had gone to dating sites, and someone left a comment to a dating site, I would let it go. However, I challenge you to find me an example where a blog comment that was fully automated was a) on topic, b) followed the conversation, and c) added value. I've yet to see it. I'm open to being proven wrong.
But I'm still not removing my spam blocker.
This is where we start to disagree as it reads as if you are changing "the rules" mid competition....
.. having said that, thats what search engines do, so it's apt :)Just because a comment is automated doesn't mean it won't add value. Google is pretty much an automated system and that adds tremendous value to the majority of searchers.
We also said above that the comment itself should add value. Just because a profile link isn't on topic doesnt mean the content of the comment isn't. I work in online marketing but that doesnt mean I cant add value to a discussion regarding my local area. The local area debate wont get value from my online marketing link but the content that I add can deliver value.We are at a semantics stage though and we both know that. I purposely asked a question for which we both know the direct and specific answers and I do understand your position.
As a final point though, I do think that when you access a third party site you should always stay within their terms of service. Has anyone here noticed Google's ToS at section 5.3?https://www.google.com/accounts/TOS Just on that basis alone it is clear (unless anyone has a specific agreement with Google they'd like to share) that you're all spammers, you just can't admit it yet :D
How did I change the rules? If the text adds value but the link does not, then the link is unnecessary and therefore should be left out. If it's in there just for linkbuilding/selfserving purposes, it's spam. That's how I look at it at least.
And I don't say that automated messages can NEVER add value. I'm just saying I haven't seen any instances of them doing so. Once again, I'd love to see examples if you have them.
You're also distracting from the issue at hand and still defining "spam" in a different way with the ToS argument. Linkbuilding defined one way is spam. Linkbuilding defined another way is not. Putting out content that gets links? Creating cool interesting content that others love and want to point others to? I have a hard time ever seeing that as spam. Once again, it all depends on the definition and until we can agree on that, we're just talking past one another.
Look back to the first post I made and the specific reference
"A rose by any other name doth smell so sweet"
The intent of an action is the arbiter of "a thing" not neccesarily the action itself. Reclaim the word!
OK I'm off to do some real work now. Merry Christmas everyone and especially you John
Won't get into the philosophical arguments here, but I look forward to continuing this over a beer in London, Jason! Happy Holidays to you and yours as well!
Did Google care about who was being harmed when they funded eHow's growth for a half-decade? And then after the Panda update they subsidized further Demand Media "content" creation for YouTube.
If Google held Google to its own editorial standards Google would be on a permanent black list.
Rand -- Truly a great debate going on here. I find myself agreeing with those commenting from both sides.
So, my concern is link building for small business, without huge SEO budgets.
Some SEOs have the point of view that if the link building isn't ultra-pure white hat, it's automatically grey hat or black hat.
OK, then let's just follow the Google's Webmaster Guidelines. I just re-read them.
Almost 1,300 words that aren't all that specific, VERY open to interpretation and VERY subjective. And Google can interpret their own rules any way they like, depending on the day of the week.
From Google's Webmaster Guidelines, https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769:
"The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it."
Really? That's "natural" for a small business with a limited budget, like a local plumber or dry cleaner?
And just leave my SEO to chance?
Is any link building that isn't SO labor intensive that the links cost our clients like $100 or $200 (or more) each, black hat?
Is a 1st. page Google ranking ONLY open to Fortune 500 businesses or business owners who've won the lottery?
Is that making the Internet more democratic?
You know, I'm not happy with sites that outrank mine. And sites my site outranks probably aren't happy with me. But I don't automatically assume that a site that outranks mine is spamming. But maybe they are.
And who subjectively decides what spam is anyway (besides Google)?
I just find it a better use of my time to focus on being more creative and then beating my competitors in a manner that complies as closely with Google Webmaster Guidelines as I can (and based on my best understanding of them).
And then, making sure I have quality, unique pages and offers that deserve to be found on page 1 in Google. But that's somewhat subjective, too.
Hey Paul - bunch of good points. I'll try to address some briefly below:
Link building isn't easy, but I'd say 99% of the literally 1,000s of tactics covered here are within Google's (and Bing's) guidelines. If you're looking for some local content/link tactics specifically, I just did a webinar on that topic here.
In terms of deciding what's spam - in the link building world, that usually means a link created to manipulate search rankings that lacks an editorial intent (e.g. blogger who links to friend's site they like w/ good anchor text is not spam, blogger who links to site they've never used b/c of payment is spam). This definition may not hold perfectly, but it's pretty good and we don't need Google, Bing or any other engine to tell us that, as users of search functions, we'd not want the spam stuff to influence rankings.
Last - totally agree that 90%+ of the time, it's far better to get creative than worry about some competitor's tactics. That's what last week's WB Friday was all about :-)
Rand, I definitely thought about that too, which is why I am not wholly opposed to outing. If there were no direct good caused by outing, then certainly we shouldn't support it.
I proposed that as the "first question" because I assume that an intrinsic part of the definition of spam is that it harms. I should have made that more clear :-)
"The disagreement, at its core, seems to be around the impacts of open webspam discussion. I think those who engage in gray/black hat manipulation (or marketing of any kind for that matter) publicly on the web shouldn't expect privacy from their fellow marketers nor from the web community as a whole."
Rand i would say 'Live and Let Live'. You don't need to do SEO any more so you can afford to do open webspam discussion and make web spam free. Pick out any popular website, analyze its backlinks and write a blog post about how spammy their back link profile is. Not a problem. You get lot of tweets, comments and social mentions in return. Even if you get a lawsuit you will be able to bear the court expenses and may be able to explain to the judge why certain website is a spam and shouldn't deserve to be on the internet. But what about others. What they will get from all this: enemity from fellow marketers or worse string of lawsuits. It is like telling a street punk "i don't like the way you live your life. Stop smoking, get a job and following the community guidelines." He is then destined to kick some ass. You are trying to enforce code of professional conduct in an industry which is and can't be regulated in the first place.
I see lot of good websites ranking high in SERPs these days and majority of them have acquired links in some way which violates some other business's (like Google) guidelines. But that doesn't make them bad/spammy websites. Web spam is not acquiring links in way which violate some search engine guidelines it is producing content which doesn't provide any value to a end user. Godaddy is a good example. It is a good website with a good service. They are not producing low value contents on the web and therefore are not spamming. I think we should seriously re-consider the defintion of web spam.
I think its easy to forget the bigger picture.
WHY does the web exist in the first place? What is its purpose? What should it be used for?
No one's going to agree on what spam is until that's clearly defined. I'd go about it in the following way;
The web, in essence is about being HUMAN. Its about things that are REAL that exists in real life. We forget this because the internet lives on computers. But we made those computers. We made the internet. The computer is just the physical thing that holds the internet.
The web is unique in that it is both one-way or two-way - it is both static and dynamic - it is both passive or interactive. Its both artistic and technical.
It is for;
I'm sure there are other sub-topic uses, but here's the point.
They are all meant to be REAL in some way, to be seen by a REAL person. The internet is about humanity.
- - - - - - -
So What is SPAM?
Spam is anything intended to deceive, either a human or search engine (although humans made search engines, and people at Google write algarhythms, so eventually there's a human being deceived somewhere).
Spam is anything on the internet made to look like something it isn't - either to human OR search engines. Some may disagree, but to me its that simple. Spam clearly has a spirit of trickery to it. Spam is lying.
Should we "out" spammers?
I think that's the wrong question entirely! I wouldn't start going on a spam hunt, just for the sake of outing people. This is a waste of time and energy. The answer there, is we should clearly not waste our time hunting spam just for the sake of it.
But I think the question should be; "WHEN is it an appropriate time to disclose spam and why?"
This changes it. I do not think we should just go around, looking for people to "out". But I do think, if it REALLY is for the greater good - to protect a business, to protect the web, to (heck I'll say it) help Google identify cases of spam so THEY can adjust things accordingly - I see no problem with coming up with an appropriate and productive way to disclose spam. Its all about the motive and the intended result. Don't "out" someone just to get blog traffic or cause trouble. Be aware of your own intentions and do it for the greater good of something else.
What Does This Mean for White-Hat SEOs?
If you're an SEO and want to be "white-hat" we need to step it up. We need to realize as SEO is evolving (I like the ring of that) - our work has to leave a true impact in REAL life - it has to touch another human. What's the REAL result of traffic, conversions, ROI? How does this affect things out in the real world? This might have varying answers depending on the circumstance. Could it be SEO helps keep a business open which helps people keep their jobs? Could it be food on the table for someone? Could it be the creation of NEW jobs by helping a company grow. Could it be through advanced use of the internet, we can spot opportunity for people, they never knew existed?
Also, good SEO draws upon things in real life to generate links, rankings, traffic, conversions. Wil Reynold's example of that snowboarding campaign they used to help injured snowboarders but it also got their client a ton of links, thats a perfect example. Or the wine store that got resources placed on .edus (links) but professors also can use this information to teach class, because its actually helpful.
SEO moving forward will be less about computers and more about affecting or drawing upon things in the real world.
On the consumer side, couldn't it even be that we help people find what they're looking for more easily - that product or service to fit an important need? Do we help that family on vacation find things to do? We help people researching information find what they need more easily? What would you rather find writing a research paper, spam or something real?
If white hats only talk about traffic and ROI (which are completely essential, don't get me wrong - the skill of SEO has to be metrics driven) but if we don't talk about what are the REAL results of our efforts, we're stuck on the same playing field as spammers.
Spammers can measure rankings and traffic and even conversions just the same. But in order for the industry to move forward, another layer needs to be added to that, and that is the human layer.
For example, I've been helping a dentist with SEO for almost a year. Honestly havn't been doing anything major - just converted his website to wordpress, created some new content on a budget, built a few legit links, cleaned up his local listings (duplicates) and have been getting some reviews. Nothing black hat at all. We've easily seen a +400% ROI. But what this means for him, is he may be able to retire "on-time" when a year ago he wasn't sure. He and his family can enjoy the Holidays together. Apart from this, he's a fantastic dentist who could not be found so easily a year ago, and now more people can find him and get great dental service! Win all around. (Side note, pretty much every other dentist in the area has spammy links).
White Hats - what are some stories of success that YOU have seen with SEO? How has SEO impacted something in the real world for you?
- - - - - -
The problem with all SEOs being seen as spammers, is that we are all seen as deceptive. People look at SEO as that thing you do where you HAVE to trick someone or something in some way to get a ranking. It is not looked at as something that can actually affect REAL life in a positive way. I'm not saying to stop using metrics and ROI and all that, but these numbers are not the end of the line. How do they touch real life in a positive way?
I'm not saying I have all the answers, and perhaps this is just another point of view for discussion, but it is easy to get tunnel visioned and forget the bigger picture, that its about more than just numbers and even money - its about the people and things in life that this all affects.
Ok, I'm done ;-)
You've literally written a blog post inside a comment :) It might be worth converting this into something for YOUmoz?
I agree. SEOmoz has enough ugc love, I would've instead turned this into at least a blog post :).
It looks like my comment on Twitter helped spark this conversation :)
What if we're talking about different things? I like what Russ has just said about spam (surely the spam we get upset about should be harmful to quality at the least, rather than being a legitimate website's non-Google-friendly activities?) - but as Rob said, different people will have different definitions of what spam is. If breaking the Google guidelines in any way is spam, I do not believe that anyone in this thread is innocent. We'd need to haggle long and hard about what actually constitutes spam before we could agree on what we should blog about, shouldn't we?
The idea of someone's old links being jumped upon by the likes of the New York Times isn't an appealing one. That isn't a totally unlikely situation: a person writing about spam for a major newspaper is unlikely to know SEO as well as we do, and won't necessarily know that the links they're outing are old. They likely won't know that you can find out when a link was added. They likely won't know that spam pops up by a range of methods: competitive sabotage, automated track-hiding, content scraping, unintentional duplicate content, etc. They likely won't be able to tell the difference between spammy noise, regular noise, natural high-quality linking and planned SEO strategy. Preferably, no one can tell the difference between the last two or three, but an untrained eye isn't likely to get it right.
As Rob said, it's very rarely that I've gone through a site's backlinks and not found what many would classify as spam. Aged sites often have a selection of very poor backlinks. We've cleaned up backlink profiles to the best of our abilities and still not managed to get rid of everything we don't like. We've also seen first-hand that people can and do buy massive numbers of poisonous links in an attempt to burn competing websites. This isn't just theorising: we've seen it happen, and had to clean that up too.
I would hate to be the SEO sitting on an account when this happens, trying to explain that "it wasn't us" when the LA Times or whoever sees fit "outs" a site's maliciously-acquired links. Some very undeserved suffering.
The argument isn't as simple as "we need to shine a light on each other", because half the time, we don't know what each other is responsible for. Again: you may out someone for bad off-page work and actually be outing negative SEO, done to them by a competitor.
If Google gets it right, those links just get discounted.
But if those links are outed in such an embarrassing way that makes Google looks stupid, you can be made an example of. I'm not willing to take that risk and out people, even if I'm sure I'm right, because I don't have access to the company or the agency's bank accounts, emails or Basecamps and I don't know what they've actually been doing.
I agree that true spam makes the web a worse place. I hate searching for something and having empty, useless pages rank. I am not sure what it's best to do about stuff like that. I've never had much of a problem with Rand or anyone else saying, "What the hell, Google - I searched for [how to make blue widgets] and was presented with a bunch of rubbish! Page after page of Adsense (lol irony), keyword stuffing and no real information whatsoever. It's all meaningless spam!"
But many of us aren't coming at this from the perspective of crap content farms or MFA sites: we're thinking about our clients who, if outing is regular practice, could well end up burning for what someone else has done to them, what an SEO company who has been fired has done to them in the past, for creatively interpreted data, or for whatever other reason than they knowingly spammed.
My initial comment on Twitter, included in the screenshot above, was neither a defence of nor a protest again outing. I used to work at SEOmoz and heard a lot of criticism aimed at Rand for writing about the topic in the past, so I was irritated not to see the same outcry when a popular developer openly admitted he was outing GoDaddy's tactic because them beating him in the SERPs had pissed him off. I don't buy the argument that it doesn't matter because Google probably won't do anything about GoDaddy: either we're okay folks with publicly highlighting SEO tactics that we don't like, or we aren't.
I am a big fan of yours, Rand. I understand the sort of spam that pops up and pisses you off, making you wonder why the hell they can't do something about it. It's annoyed me too. But outing can and will get abused or done mistakenly, and I'm not personally willing to potentially cause massive damage to another business because I have an inkling that they broke Google's guidelines.
The concept of Seo Mafia is something I am used to discuss a lot, and - maybe because I lived in a country that actually is suffering the most known one - it is something I cannot stand. And Mafiia is a state of mind, which reproduces itself and spread in every human field: Seo included. And must be fought and eradicated. To pretend transparency but act as we were a secret sect is totally contradictory and, especially, hypocrite. We cannot pretend to be seriously considered by the not Seo and the Clients if we are not the first denouncing those sites that are without a doubt acting against the rules. And I firmly believe that this does not mean that we cannot or mustn't discuss openly those rules, which are dictated by search engines and which they - and google especially - are quite used to break for they own properties. And what about when we discover thar someone we know personally is author of webspam? Maybe in that case, personally I would prefer to discuss the "discovery" with him, know directly from him why he did it, but probably - if its a crystal clear case of webspam I would talk publicly about it.
I agree with gfiorelli1 also living in a country (Italy) which does everthing to stop competition / innovation (like trying to bring in a law to force private bloggers to be journalists), bad/unfair practices should be outed for the good of everyone.
Anyone doing black hat - thereby giving the opportunity of other to out one - knows its a calculated risk. The calculation is altered significantly if more websites are outed for spamming, thereby helping remove spam.
I have no problem outing spammers. It might take away their living, but they are already taking that living away from non-spammers.
Great discussion though.
And, if one day, a competitor of yours decides to throw some spammy links at your website & then convinces Rand to blog about it, will that opinion change at all?
Of course Google won't do anything if your site is GoDaddy.com ... but if you are a smaller business your philosophy may have just killed your business.
Oops.
Hey Aaron - seen that as a common concern, so how about this: let's try link spamming a site (how about my personal blog - pretty small, only a year old, probably a good proxy for a small biz site?) and see whether we can actually hurt it.
I don't think the engines ban sites when bad links are discussed publicly (or reported privately, which happens thousands of times a day), but rather, they try to write algos to remove their value. If that's the case, then the argument that writing about webspam could "hurt" a site is a false one. It merely means that the webspam team might choose to work on ways to filter their value (which never should have existed in the first place).
I think if you highlight the site in advance you also create a public awareness that can cause certain exceptions to be granted.
However it is very common for people to nuke themselves with certain link building techniques...thus if a person can accidentally do it to themselves, it must also be possible to do it intentionally to a competitor as well. Someone sees a competitor standing near an edge and gives them a shove over the line with too much anchor text (or similar).
I do agree that the older a site is & the more trust signals it has the harder it is to sabotage with link spam. But competitive sabotage is far more common on sites that are already aggressively targeting a high value keyword than they are on a personal side blog (there is no real economic incentive to throw spam links at most unmonetized peronal blogs that do not target commercial keywords).
"Someone sees a competitor standing near an edge and gives them a shove.."
In that sense you just provided a great reason to keep your SEO tactics away from that cliff.
I can say confidently that it is possible to destroy a website with links. It is not inexpensive, but it is totally possible
This is why I propose handling "outing" in the same way that a respectible security research firm handles vulnerability disclosures. I believe the "outers" have an ethical responsibility to notify the businesses they target well in advance with enough time to fix whatever is being done and give them the opportunity to respond to those claims on the same public forum upon which you intend to publish. It allows us to openly discuss while treating the webmaster (who more often than not is unaware of the tactics being used and/or Google's policy towards them) unfairly.
I just wanted to add my comment speaking from the client side. We're a small company - an online retailer in the UK - and we've made improving our SEO efforts a priority this past year and going into 2012. The deeper I delve, the more depressed I get with the webspam activity and the co-opting of blogs by public relations agency staff in our industry.
When I discovered the SEOmoz blog a few months ago it was like a breath of fresh air. This has been the only place I found encouragement to believe that it is possible to engage in high quality SEO with valuable, readable content and legitimate, engaging social activity.
Working this way is slow and labour intensive. Outsourcing would be wonderful, but where do I find SEOs who understand the kind of campaign we want to create?
My collegues often find me slumped face down on my desk and comment "You've been bloghopping again, haven't you?" And I can see them smerking at each other when they hear I'm on the phone to yet another SEO salesperson assuring me that they don't use scummy links on abandoned blogs (while I'm busy online tracing back the link history for their own site).
I've watched competitors with larger SEO budgets than us rise to no. 1 and then fall in their SERPs in a space of 48-36 hours, having spent goodness knows what buying traffic (really? They rank no. 38 in some city in Korea? Whoda thunk it?), Likes and thousands of blog comments.
What I want to say is if you believe in whitehat methods, please get out to the small business marketing forums and blogs and teach us the alternatives.
Until I landed on SEOmoz, I had no idea how outdated my knowledge was. Now that I know you can tackle SEO in a more "handcrafted" way, SEO fits into our marketing mix more comfortably. More importantly, it works. We've seen massive improved SERP results within days or even hours of the creation of a single sticky high quality backlink. People need to know there are other ways to tackle SEO than the old-school techniques.
(I'm not even going to be hypocritical and post a link back to our site here - we're in the wrong industry for starters!)
Thanks for posting from the client-side. I just joined a BNI group (a local business referral network) and out of 57 members, I'll repeat FIFTY SEVEN MEMBERS, they ALL know nothing of the legitimate side of SEO. Its really quite astonishing. The only other person who tried to join to fill the SEO seat (as I hear) was one of those "we'll rank you #1 of Google GUARENTEED!!). Sad that this is still the mainstream impression of SEO. They didn't know rankings were "personalized" in Google, they don't know why sites rank the way they do, and they don't know that many "SEOs" just buy a bunch of links (and how risky that is).
So I agree one thousand percent, we need to be in places business owners are, sharing, teaching and talking about what good, quality, REAL SEO is. Great point and great comment. This is what I plan to make my mission in the BNI group. To eventually get these 57 members on board with the idea that SEO is a legit industry. And expand from there...
"The no Snitching rule" - or the code of silence is what keeps the most violent organized criminals in place. Those that can't do organized crime go into SEO :-).
I find it bitterly ironic that the "No Snitch" rule is alive and well in our post 2008 corporate culture, where the Madoffs & Citi Banks snitches pay terrible prices for "Outing". Career suicide. For the purposes of disclosure I almost got my butt fired when I disclosed funny business to my former superiors (Financial), pretty much curtailing any chance of advancement. It even became dangerous when I later was physically threatened! I wish I was making this up.
I doubt that Joost just suddenly decided-- lets go "Out" GoDaddy! for image link spamming. There are consequences. Most of us are sheep or insecure in our positions to take those chances. Postscript: I am the last man standing from my ex-company. The former principles (fired) continue to operate in the same manner with new ventures and such at other company(s). The former behaviour and lack of consequences has left me jaded, a lot of people lost money & jobs. I'm no richer nor am I going to get an award in Time Magazine for doing the right thing. But my current employer respects me & knows I will stand by my principles. Trust is a fragile thing, but I can go to bed at night with a clear conscience. People become too scared or apathetic to give a damn. We all shake our heads and let the other guys take care of it. Outing bad behaviour prevents the perpetrators from continuing, before they reach the Madoff level. Aarron Wall brought up the scenario of hostile link spamming. While
Spam is a nuisance, but it speaks volumes about the organizations that condone it or are too ignorant to do a little research on the company they hired. And the ones that do it intentionally? It leaves me angry. Rudolph Giulliani cleaned up New York by going after small offenders "Turn-Stile" Jumpers, suddenly the incidence of crime on subways plummeted (go figure!). Turn-Stile jumping is like SEO Link Spam. The small stuff is symptomatic of larger attitudes, muggers on subways.
I firmly believe "A principle is not a principle unless it costs you money!" Don't expect companies to suddenly change bad behaviour without financial consequences or reputation gaffs. The problem is the current corporate felons, have not suffered those consequences! So the behaviour persists.
I may be naive but snitching on the small stuff prevents greater harm down the line. Because it seems we are still rewarding bad behavior, we call it "snitching" not "civic responsibility". Spam is a nuisance like smoking was 40 years ago. I hope that spamming one day sent outside in the cold where it belongs. Google can't do it alone.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Stan Oppenheimer
Hmmm.... SearchEngineMan I want to like what you are saying. I really do. It sounds so good, so right. But I have to ask, who in this example plays the role of Guiliani? And who are the Nazi's? I feel like you would enlist all SEO's in a crusade against "Those that can't do organized crime".
It seems to me the argument for 'outing' is to raise the ethical standards of our profession.
I must ask - how is this handled in other, more established industries? Reputable businesses don't go around pointing fingers at their competition who are practicing without a license. There are too busy making $$. What they do is form a governing body who educates the consumers about the dangers of going with an unlicensed contractor. Then consumers do a pretty good job of policing who amongst the unlicensed (or licensed even) are the actual "rip offs" by reporting them to the BBB, governing bodies, or if needed - the authorities.
If white hats want to elevate the profession, then get out there and educate. Many of you do, true, but often that education is targeted at other SEO's. You know who isn't reading this thread? Our clients. And until clients know what all this means to them, none of this debate will ever be settled, because at the end of the day many clients appreciate ly2from's "just get the job done" attitude.
Many clients don't care to know how the sausage is made, and I can't pass judgement on them. Not everyone is Anthony Bourdain. Those people are rare. Our industry as a whole needs to give clients a reason to learn the important points of hiring a sausage maker. Maybe we can talk about how to do that? As long as we sit here and go back and forth about the merits of spamming and outing, this industry will not evolve.
In the spirit of finishing with pithy quotes, I give you Ben Franklin's famous words - "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Not too keen on the good seo/bad seo issue as it sidetracks the main discussion. There are people on both sides of this argument who are competent or better and there are guys on both sides who are incompetent.
Personally, I'm uncomfortable presenting anything to clients that is going to potentially harm them. They're not going to be understanding about how unlikely it was, or how other people get away with it.
I do understand though that there are people out there happy to assume that kind of risk, but that's their choice and being outed for it is part of that risk. I don't think for a second that there should be any frowning on those exposing these practices.
I have a problem with spammers using the term "outing" when their tactics are exposed to the light of day. It's marketing. Don't try to clothe it by comparing as some kind of high minded societal issue. Spamming is not an activity whch ranks up there with civil rights.
It's a matter of revealing those who fly false colors. If one is unwilling to own their behavior and expect others to keep those activities secret, that says volumes about the quality of their efforts.
It's time to grow up and leave the playground social values behind.
If anything, I think GoDaddy's effective use of anchor text "spamming" is proof that anchor text still rules the SERPs. That's not to say that other factors don't matter...of course they do...but AT is the most powerful tool in an SEO's took it IMO.
Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with openly discussing the tactics used by spammers without directly mentioning their site.
Finally, I think that what's absent in this conversation is Google's arbitrary definition of spam, i.e. "manipulating the search results". I won't...but I could...give you countless definitions of the word "manipulation" and 90% of white hat SEO tactics fall within the confines of that word.
Fantastic debate; we should absolutely be talking about the 'bad' in exactly the same way as we talk about the 'good', regardless of motive, perception or perpetrator. The more knowledge the individual practitioneer and outsider is armed with, the better equipped both the practitioner and the industry are to mature a little bit faster...
"regardless of motive, perception or perpetrator"
If you strip all context from a conversation it is to leave it devoid of meaning.
And if you strip out the "perpetrator" a lot of Google's own behaviors (ranking empty places pages, padding out those pages out with unauthorized use of Yelp reviews content, wholesale scanning/scraping books, etc.) wouldn't score particularly high against their editorial guidelines either.
One thing that keeps coming up to me in reading the comments and our conversation is that you're clearly coming from a perspective of how we should handle Google and operate in Google's world. I'm not particularly seeing why Google has to keep coming up in this discussion.
As a user of the web, I want less spam - both in content, in the quality of results and in what does or doesn't influence what's surfaced (whether in search, social media, content marketing, blog links or editorial/inbound sources of any kind). As a marketer, I want to promote the idea that our practices (SEO/social/content/inbound marketing) are designed to make the web a better place. I think webspam detracts from that and using terminology like "outing" and "ratting out" and "tattling" is merely a semantic tactic to frame the debate on terms I can't agree with.
I don't care if Google becomes 10X as evil as they are today (though, if they do, I hope searchers and marketers flee to more worthy parts of the web, and I probably also generally think they're about 1/10th as evil as you do today), I still believe that forming a mafia of web marketers to cover up spam is the wrong thing to do.
Let's leave Google out of the discussion and try to talk about what we can control - our own behaviors, the perception of our field and whether what we're doing/encouraging/promoting is best for the future of the industry.
If we were in book publishing & moving from print to digital we would focus on Amazon.com. We would have a hard time discussing that trend & transition without bringing up words like Amazon and Kindle.
If a company has monopoly marketshare then they dictate the terms of that marketplace. They are the primary lens into the market & they shape a lot of the linguistics in the market as well.
Here is a quick litmus test...
For each of those answers directly impacting the market, how many times did you list things associated with Google vs things associated with other search companies?
Google dominates media coverage & even when they borrow concepts from Bing or Yahoo! they spin them as new. They have the largest search marketshare, they are a huge monetization engine, they own the default most widely used analytics service, they funded the content farms, they bought YouTube & promoted video hard, they flat out own the mobile search market, etc.
The cost of building a search engine is going down, but the legal costs of competing against things like Google's book scanning project & the costs of marketing a generaly (non-niche) search engine to a broad base of consumers keeps going up.
We can set our own browsers to default to Bing or Blekko or another search engine like DuckDuckGo, but until Google is significantly under 2/3 of the web search market I don't think they should (or can) be ignored.
If there were 10 search engines with 5% to 15% marketshare each then I don't think many people would care much about outing...it is precisely the concentation of search marketshare that is the big issue.
I think what Rand is saying (and correct me if I am wrong) is that we need to be able to see the web as without the constant close-focus on one particular company.
Instead of talking about what web spam does to users of the Internet, we end up talking about how Google's algorithms suck or how large companies are web spamming.
Imagine: Instead of solving the problem of population growth, the politically inclined will start talking about immigration reforms and turn the argument into a political one that takes sides.
I love Google!
We hate Google!
If you like webspam, then you're against us!
Converstions of this sort ends up with threads about how Google treats webspam, instead of how we should deal and view web spam if Google did not exist, search engines did not exist, or if there are 10 players in the SE industry and none owned a majority market share.
In my SEO philosophy sheet on my first week at the job here I wrote,
"#6: Google does have a large percent of the market and in essence, we are optimizing for them. They are the best at search. But that does not mean they are alway right."
Most fraud is immoral from a real-world perspective. Most spam is only dirty because it interferes with Google's business activity and expected service level, therefore they disparage it.
Considering this, the sentence "I'm not particularly seeing why Google has to keep coming up in this discussion" is one of the most self-discrediting lines I have read in a debate.
One thing to add: Aaron is clearly a big-picture guy. He is trying to make sense of the world and its workings in general. Just look at the books, persons and issues he mentions in this twitter "duel" and on his blog...
On the other hand, most practitioners of SEO (or any other profession, for that matter) couldn't give a toss about the big picture as long as they find excitement and self-fulfilment in their daily jobs.
In fact, it's probably more profitable ("profit" as in "bottom line") to stick to the everyday issues of your profession and developing your business than wander off in countless other horizon-widening intellectual directions.
That's why, I'm afraid, this debate is between someone who will have a perfectly crafted and watertight argument relevant within a professional bubble, and someone who keeps trying to put it in a bigger perspective, but whose argument is mainly lost on those choosing not to look outside this bubble.
ITT: Bad SEOs cry about "webspam" and discuss about how it's a good thing to rat people out.
In all seriousness, only bad "SEOs" report spam. Good SEOs just beat their competitors or move on to new niches.
Hack SEOs, which is where most people fit in, sit around and cry because the 10 hours a day of on-site SEO and sending of emails to webmasters begging for links isn't working.
Some people need to go back to their desk jobs answering phone at the local insurance company and forget about being in SEO and affiliate marketing.
Should Webspam be discussed plublicly? Absolutely! Yin and Yang. As much as I despise black/gray hat techniques and refuse to use them, they are needed. I agree with Aaron in some respect regarding the fact that you don't want a "standardized industry" managed by rules and regulations. It's the black/gray hat wearing practioneers that force me to find creative ways to produce valuable concepts and content the audience appreciates. Oh and while I am on the subject of Yin/Yang and balance, I guess it wouldn't hurt to throw out the concept of Karma. Even though blackhat techniques may help you rank, you eventually pay the penalty for making the web a crappier place. Maybe the karma police come in the form of a Google penalty, a "call out" from a peer, or worse - weakening brand loyalty to the customers you are black marketing to. The black hat people can say white hat people pay the karma police in other ways.
Regardless of which side of the fence you are on, without discussion, there is no further improvement.
Truth or the best policy, practice, idea, arises out of the competition of widely various ideas in free, transparent public discourse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas
Of course, the time, place, and manner of these discussions ought to be conducted respectfully and professionally.
However, without the discourse, we do more harm to our collective understanding, and thereby, innovation.
Great discussion, thank you for having it and sharing it.
I think the problem is in the end of the day is that most big business do not understand what is truely going on with SEO, they may only understand the basics of it. You can not tell me that all CEO's of fortune 500 companies will know SEO, they will not, it will come down to the VP of marketing may only know the limited basics, then you have the head of digital who knows a bit more and then you have a SEO, who really does not have a whole lot of say in the business he just is their to monitor what the hired SEO company is doing, unless it is inhouse.
With most of these SEO companies who do large scale web spam, they never provide a full list of links in which they built to clients websites, paid, junk what ever works, they have no transparency. These companies come into a businesses and pitch with an emphasis on ROI, Quick Wins, Guaranteed results and bringing in resultand clients lap it up becuase in the end of the day web spam is still driving results. In the end of the day these businesses do not know.
I remember recently we pitchased for a global client, we missed the account, a few months on I thought hey I will see what the new agency is "up too"...my findings indicated large scale link networks, web spam, widget placements all the dirty things you can think of.
The problem is that when they do realise what is happening it is often too late and it is the case that I have been seeing recently where we come in to assist a company who has been damaged by large scale link spam whent hey have been burnt.
I agree with the points about you need to practice what you preach, you need to have your own test sites you need to know all the ins and out of SEO, becuase in the end of the day the best knowledge come from your own practice. Sure enoug you can find good information on blogs, but really it is only limited you are never going to find the golden nuggets via your own investigations becuase people do not share them.
It's all spam FFS! The entire thing is a case of putting lipstick on a pig, any way you look at it. The only business that isn't web spamming is wikipedia - and they aren't selling anything.We are not in blade runner land yet folks. Google's algo can no more detect quality than it can smell a rose - or any more than a sundial can 'see' sunlight. And all the while this is so, there will be more money to be made being popular (or simply by being voluminous) than there will being 'good'. Google started the whole thing, and everyone else is just trying to make a living, so any comments on Google's part as to "be good, children" are a bit rich IMO. You think they give a rat's ass about anyone except their shareholoders?Speaking of rats, when it comes to people ratting people out, there will always be someone willing to rat you out if it means they go up the rankings and you go down. That's the reason people rat people out! And that's the reason why as far as future-proofing your business is concerned, webspam is arguably a bad idea. Not because Google can detect it (yet). But because humans will happily trample on someone else who is visibly 'cheating'.
Wikipedia is a PageRank funnel for Wikia...look at Uncyclopedia if you think everything they are doing is pure & clean. ;)
There is no escaping the public nature of the web.
If you put it out there, you should understand that you have made it public. If you don't get that, then you need to have a long think about your understanding of the field you are working in.
Having made it public, you have opened it for the world to see. If someone out there has the ability or insight to figure out what you are doing in a public space, then they should have the ability to discuss it in a public space. This is not rocket science.
In the real world, if people work for a company that indulges in bad business practice, that company eventually will be exposed to the world for the good of the people. Yes, people might lose their jobs. Yes, the company may lose money, but in the end that is their responsibility. If they choose the behavior, they choose the consequences.
Holding our industry to any lesser standard than that expected of the rest of the business community is doing us a disservice and perpetuating an environment of gaming and poor quality tactics. It is way past time people stopped looking for the next great "trick" and being rewarded for it with a code of silence and secret acceptance.
As for standardization, there are many industries where it has actually led to increased earnings and higher returns because the standard itself becomes something of value to the customer. With industry standards come opportunities to demonstrate that you are proficient and work to an accepted set of guidelines. This can set you apart from those who do not work to attain that level of proficiency. Also not rocket science...
Thanks for putting the debate in front of the Moz community Rand - unfortunately it is a subject that needs to be revisited often.
-Sha
Define "gaming"...
Also, while I appreciate your opinion, I think that you should be aware of the fact that you're basically "laughing off" one of the most intelligent and respected people in SEO. I don't think Rand would have posted the converstaion...much less, polled it, if he thought it was an "open and shut" case.
Oh no. I'm not laughing it off...I don't find it the least bit amusing.
I also don't find it amusing to be viewed as though I am by default a person who will do anything, regardless of ethics or standards, to achieve an end, as long as I can get away with it. Unfortunately, this is the reputation I must live with because the industry I choose to work in seems hell-bent on allowing itself to be portrayed that way.
Respecting someone for their abilities does not automatically mean that they get a free pass on something that I don't happen to agree with. I do however accept, that having said what I think in public, I have made myself fair game for your criticism and I am quite OK with that.
Incidentally - my use of the term "gaming" (not the first time it has been used in this arena, so hard to believe that you genuinely require a definition, but affording you the benefit of the doubt...) was a reference to the idiom - "play games" - to act in an evasive, deceitful, manipulative, or trifling manner in dealing with others. I hope that helps.
-Sha
So is paying for a link gaming the alogrithm? If so, should all the sites that have links from the Yahoo web directory be penalized? And should Forbes be banned from the SERPs for continuing to sell links?
My point is...there are not set standards for "gaming" or "manipulating"...it all revolves around what Google decides is "gaming". More importantly, the rules are not universally applied. Some sites can get away with a lot more "gaming" than others.
Great discussion Rand. I have the upmost respect for both you and Aaron who I view as two of the most knowlegable, successful SEO practitioners/tool providers/teachers/industry thought leaders, yet with very different perspectives on this highly-charged issue. Simply awesome. Thanks for sharing.
If white hats want to elevate the profession, then get out there and educate. Many of you do, true, but often that education is targeted at other SEO's. You know who isn't reading this thread? Our clients. And until clients know what all this means to them, none of this debate will ever be settled, because at the end of the day many clients appreciate ly2from's "just get the job done" attitude.
How do we educate them ?
On a mass level and on a small scale ....
I think that is the million dollar question @Duncan274.
I like Melissa Hill's point about getting into small business marketing forums, and evolvingSEO's point about joining a chapter of BNI.
Seems to me, the mantra "Think Globally, Act Locally" is the best solution of effecting change on a mass scale. For me, I only take clients on who understand what my philosophy of SEO is. It often involves an hour of free consultation, both to educate them, and to educate myself on their expectations and business. I don't take on all comers. I am selective in my process. May not work for everyone, but it is how I choose to "fight the good fight".
On a mass scale, the short answer is you can't educate people until they understand why they should care. Other industries who do it effectively will broadcast the problem as a group, then craft and share a simple message over and over. Like my "Only hire licensed contractors" example. I would expect some group of whitehat people needs to come together to create the "White Hat Certification", then we go out and tout why a client should only hire white hat SEO. Go to www.whitehat.com to make sure your SEO guy is listed there. You get the idea...
Until something on that scale is done, I don't expect this debate to ever really change anything. And if anyone on reading this wants to enact this idea, please do. All I ask is free inclusion in the database. ;)
I've got a slightly different approach. I think spam should only be openly discussed if it is working. If you see someone spamming, and you see it working, then call it out. I ran in to such an example the other day. From nowhere to #1 in about 6 days. Clicking on the search result actually redirected the page to an affiliate link which redirected to the manufacturer's page...the same page that ranked #2. Don't know how they got there so fast, their spam shouldn't have helped that much, and don't know how they got away with that redirect for so long, but I made sure as many people as possible knew about it. Now I also see lots of websites spamming like crazy and it is not helping them. I have no interest in saying anything about them. I would prefer they keep thinking their spam is doing some good. Keeps them from doing the actual good stuff which could compete with me.
So I say let the spammer spam. If you ever catch it working, out them. Otherwise, let them merrily spam away.
I believe that you live by the sword if you are spamming. If you are outed it's your own fault regardless of the site, the situation or the motivation of the "snitch". It would be interesting to see a debate on what level of spamming deserves outing though. Sometimes the interpretation of what is web spam can differ.
"If you're gonna do the crime, you gotta do the time." This goes for both sides of the coin.
Heads: If you (or your clients) are small time mom and pop brand, and you are using spammy SEO methods, the clock is ticking... you will get caught eventually. For larger brands, I think Google has already made it clear that they are happy to look the other direction, or at worst, slap a wrist when it comes to spammy SEO tactics from the big boys.
Tails: Is snitching a crime? No. Is it admirable? IMO, no, not so much. I would rather concentrate on my work than worry about and/or publicly bitch about what another website is doing. But that's just me. For those in the community that feel the need to publicly out spammy SEO, go for it. But I think you are wasting your breath when it comes to 'outing' larger brands. Again, just my $0.02 here.
As a side note, since it was mentioned somewhere up thread.. I just completed a test where I absolutely d-e-v-i-s-t-a-t-e-d the rankings across the board for one of MY OWN test sites by pointing a ton of spammy links to it via Scrapebox. This was a very small brand, established (1999 domain) site that had been ranking page 1 and top 3 for all of it's key terms for years. In a matter of 4-5 hours of work using Scrapebox, I killed it deader than dead. I then went back and removed as many of the spammy links as possible (emailed blog owners, etc.) and the rankings came back almost overnight. Take it for what you will, but in my mind there is absolutely NO doubt that I could have done this to a competitior's site as well. This is a huge, gaping, scary hole in the Google algo that they need to desperately get in check.
The idea that having professional self policing and a sense of professionalism is equivelant to standardized mass production, a la cheap iPhone cases and knock-off Louis Vuitton bags, is a little silly on it's face.
More troubling is the assertion that exposing spammers is going to "cut SEO wages" and lead to an era of "cheap outsourced SEO". It seems to me that Wall has been out of the game for too long. As I see it, it's exactly the opposite. Doing solid, reliable white-hat SEO is where the big bucks are, and it's the only part of the process that is completely non-outsourceable. Building solid relationships, looking for good, high quality backlinks and courting their owners, planning an SEO-friendly site design, etc. These are all the things I get paid the big bucks to do.
Link spamming and other black hat and grey hat tactics, on the other hand, I could outsource to someone in China or Brighton Beach for $200 a month. It's the link spammers that make it harder and harder to sell good, high-price, high quality SEO services to companies. In fact, the biggest sales obstacle I encounter these days is "My friend knows this guy who can do SEO for us for $200. And it works. Why am I paying you so much, again?"
It's the same debate we're having on the content side of things. If you do thinks shoddy or shady, you can get them done for dirt cheap. And the reason that's becoming the standard is because too few people are willing to stand up and say "Who, guys, you're flooding the net with absolute garbage!"
So Mr. Wall, to you I say "Stop selling eBooks and 'classes' that ammount to little more than regurgitation of the same resources you can find for free easilly, and look out at what is ACTUALLY happening in the SEO world."
As far as the fear of destroying businesses or taking away someones "right of agency" by outing them, good. A business built at the expense of legitimate SEOs deserves to fail. Period. Just like a business that relies on illegal sweat-shops and puts legitimate companies under deserves to fail. Lets cut out the "Robin hood, fighting against the tyrrany of oppression" BS and recognize that this is nothing more than a smoke screen to cover up something that people KNOW is wrong.
It's ironic that Mr. Wall seems to rail against standardization and professionalism as leading to a state of wage-slavery while defending people that make Walmart look like the paragon of good business ethics.
That was a pretty scummy troll comment.
I won't call you personally a troll. After all, maybe you are just ignorant.
But I will note that many of the things I do that are labeled by your buddies as "spam" are years later repackaged as "advanced" ... take that to mean whatever you must, but it appears the people who want to "standardize" things don't have a consistent & standard view of techniques.
Wow, I'm surprised Aaron took the time to respond to your comment. If you think Aaron is selling eBooks (he's not) or 'classes' that regurgitate the same information you can find for free, you're sorely mistaken. No one knows "what is actually happening in the SEO world" more than Aaron.
The comparison between SEO tactics that are against Google's guidelines and sweat shops or other illegal activity is silly. So-called black/gray hat SEO isn't illegal or even immoral. Most people who really make money on the web or compete in any niche worth competing in understand what has to be done to thrive, and they do it. The VAST majority of profitable internet enterprises engage in black/gray hat tactics to some degree. Choosing to publicly out any one of them in particular hurts a business owner who is only doing what is NECESSARY to compete in most niches.
Godaddy aren't the only hosting company spamming footer links.
Westhost also includes a link in the footer of the 2 default theme's which are included in all new installations of WordPress.
I don't know if they have an agreement with WordPress but here's the code i grabbed from the Twenty Eleven default theme.
div id="site-generator">
<?php do_action( 'twentyeleven_credits' ); ?>
<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'twentyeleven' ) ); ?>" title="<?php esc_attr_e( 'Semantic Personal Publishing Platform', 'twentyeleven' ); ?>" ><?php printf( __( 'Proudly powered by %s', 'twentyeleven' ), 'WordPress' ); ?></a> - <a href="https://www.westhost.com">PHP Hosting by WestHost</a>
nice article
"Outing" doesn't matter much. Sending spam reports to Google seems to have little or no effect. From the loud complaints about web spam on Google forums, those don't stop spam either. Nothing seems to be happening to the more blatant SEO promoters advertising "Google Places Guaranteed" or "Bulk +1s".
Press coverage in the New York Times works, as with the J.C. Penny incident. When Google had to pay a $500 million fine over dodgy pharmacy ads and essentially pled guilty to a felony, that had some effect. It takes a big club to get Google's attention.
This was not one of the better posts I've read on Seomoz. Trying to make sense out of the back-and-forth tweeting was ridiculous. I totally think this issue merits a vigorous debate and that Rand and Aaron may as well be the ones to take the different sides, but let them each write a few thousand words about it, or let them debate each other publicly and post the videos.
I sure there is a really good conversation going on above me here. The question I have is what good SEO'r has time to read this? I struggle to to find the time to read the article never mind the comments.
No ones saying you have to, but if you'd like to better educate yourself on this debate (which will surely show up in the future), then these comments by some of the best SEOs in the industry is a great place to start.
Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate the professional debate. thanks for being willing to share.
Very intersting conversation, Rand. Thanks for posting it. I've always appreciated your stance on webspam.
Regarding your question about where people stand on the debate, I guess it depends on your view of SEO as a discipline. If your stance is that outing spam dilutes the power of SEO and the corresponding wages that can be demanded for that service, then I guess you have to see SEO as a non-creative, automation-prone process in which drones can replace the work of the standard SEO professional.
This is not my experience. Rather my experience has been that to do SEO well requires HIGH levels of creativity, understanding of busines objectives, engaging/motivating people, driving action, etc.
So, while the nuts and bolts of SEO might be something that can be standardized; engagement, motivation, impact, conversion are things that will NEVER be automated and will always require the afrorementioned characteristics. As SEO continues to become more of the latter and less of the former due to updates in search algorithms, like Panda, the level of those characteristics required to succeed become even more crucial, more vital, making the value of a true SEOer higher, not lower.
Building on that premise, outting spammy practices only helps to separate the wheat from the chalf. It forces us to be MORE creative, MORE customer focused, LESS dependant on churn-and-burn processes of manipulating the algos. And I, for one, am all for it!
Another +1 for transparency!
Webspam should most certainly be open for public discussion in the marketing community, in time the search engines algorithms will become more advanced and webspam will no longer work to rank sites well, when that time comes, the discussion will die down. However, until then, an open debate will be beneficial for all those in the SEO community...
A lot of Spammy SEO link building is carried out for small businesses who lack the time and money to invest in extensive link building campaigns and content development. They hire an agency who uses a networks of site and spammy blogs for link building (I have seen this a lot).
So in this case it makes sence to 'out' spammy practises to prevent businesses falling victim to this trap. Having said all this I have to agree with what ly2from said about the reality of link building for most sites.
What about considering the perspective of web searchers?
By definition spam creates lower quality search results. It seems that by saying open discussion about spam should not be allowed (or should be discouraged) you're essentially saying that web searchers should not have a say in the quality of the search results. If they see search results that don’t fully satisfy their need they shouldn’t be able to let the search engine know.
How is this really any different from that?
Thanks for posting this Rand I'm proud to be a part of a community that embraces transparency as one for their core tenets. I hope that transparency can become a bigger part of the SEO community as a whole.
There's always going to be people trying to game a system for personal gain. Just take a look at the stock market.
I'm not to sure it really matters if there's open discussion about these issues or not and infact it's impractical to force open discussion.
This made me think about open/closed source software. Should all software be open or should all software be closed? The answer is: the developer should be able to decide.
Also, if someone could figure out how the developer made closed source software... isn't it okay for him to tell his friends? Why wouldn't it be?
Like most industries, there is the opportunity to engage in less than honorable methods for achieving end goals. Some positions have stigmas associated with them for continuously relying on these methods for success. I believe accountability for one's actions is always a great motivator. If we remove that, we remove any consequences that dissuade people from repeatedly relying on reprehensible means.
Personally, I want our industry to gain more respect, and claim a higher reputation among the professional world. The only way to achieve this is to set standards to weed out those guilty of said tactics. The responsibility is ours, no one likes to be a tattletale, but there must be a level of accountability in every industry.
Just like anything that is essentially "wrong", you risk being exposed in one way or another. Exposing someone for paid links is the same thing; if you're going to do it, know the risks involved.
It's funny, because I really wanted to pick a side on this one, but I'm stuck right in the middle! Here's why:
When Aaron starts talking about everyone with $35k/year jobs, he's forgetting the Creativity aspect. Yes, you might be all doing the same jobs, but just like in any profession, there's a reason you pay a guy more than another guy for the same work. At the same time, Aaron is also correct, because at some point SEO will become standardized. It's inevitable. Google can't change the game forever; they're eventually going to come to a point when they've dealt with every problem (well, maybe not EVERY problem, but like hand sanitizer, they'll kill 99.9% of germs (black hat tactics)).
In conclusion, outing is OK. I completely agreed with Rand when he said that you'd be protecting spammers instead of doing good by not outing. People come to the conclusion that outing causes inevitable consequences, but this is definitely not the case. Google knows damaging these brands can open up a lot of problems, so just because Yoast showed GoDaddy's link spam tactic, it doesn't mean there will be any effect. If anything, outing is best as an educational resource for SEOs and what other brands are doing (and sometimes getting away with).
Phew. Longest comment for me on a post in quite sometime!
What "tactic"? They are using footer links...welcome to 2001. Any good SEO has a network of sites to add footers and blogrolls to.
https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-hosting/
Yoast seems to be pretty into hosting. Chances they actually own vps.net or are in bed with them? Don't know, but you don't think yoasts bullshit "outting" is just sour grapes, do you? I mean, it couldn't be...
<removed personal attack>
ly2from - first, I know your personal attack (calling jrcooper a "sheep") was not particularly egregious as web comments go, but it's not the sort of thing we tolerate here on Moz.
Second, your statement that "any good SEO has a network of sites to add footers and blogrolls to," sounds to me like something that applies to link spammers, not to professional SEOs. I know thousands of good SEOs, and I'd bet less than 1% run a network of site that they spam with footer links.
Are you outing someone who is harming and deceiving clients or are you outing because you are atop a rather high horse and believe hat color to be about morals? Or perhaps you out just to improve your blog posts at the expense of others?
As I noted in the post, it's been a number of years since I've openly discussed webspam, so I don't have specific motives to share. In Aaron's post on Mahalo, some folks get angry about it in the comments and he responds with his reasons there, which I think are worthy and defensible.
I am, however, of the belief that almost regardless of motivation, opening up of webspam topics in the marketing community is a good thing.
I'd extend that as far as to say it's totally kosher to write about your top competitors' spam publicly, learn from it, from the comments and if the engines see fit to shut down the value of that spam, all the better for everyone. Spam makes the rest of the marketing, web and technology world view SEO as an unethical, manipulative, scummy practice. It drags down the reputation and perception of a great field filled with great people and it does so to protect those who make the web a worse place.
It's hard not to make comparisons to a mafia or a secret society who knows they're doing evil but wants to force everyone to shut up about it.
Rand, you're obviously a pretty big figure in the SEO world and know a ton of people. You probably know a lof of really awesome SEOs and you probably know even more weekend warriors.
When I think of an SEO, I think of someone who can rank sites. At the end of the day you're going to have to get links to rank a site, all the on-page tweaking in the world isn't going to rank you for any decent terms.
So you can either buy links, have your own resources to put links on like private networks which is what I do, or you may be one of the very very very few who are lucky enough to have true viral groth. When you have a product so awesome people do your link building for you. Or, you can do some more hardcore web spam like SB, XR, LFE, SEnuke, pligg spam, or non-public tools.
Point is, you will have to generate links by some method if you wanna rank websites. I understand there is always the "white hat" link building option but let's be realistic, if you have more than a couple clients it's literally impossible to do white hat link building as it takes forever to do it correctly and effectivly. And don't forget how Matt Cutts defines this stuff, anything you do to purposly alter or manipulate your ranking in google is not considered natural link building.
I break my link building down like this:
And it works, very well.
Don't blame me for doing it, blame Google for not fixing it. For every site someone reports, 5 more will popup. The only way this stops is when Google stops using links to rank sites. If they just change how the links rank sites like only counting links from "trusted" sites then people like me will just aquire "trusted sites" and continue doing what we're doing.
Until Google can use some form of advanced AI to determine who should rank there will ALWAYS be people gaming google. No matter what they use to rank sites, it will be gamed.
What can Google use to rank websites that CAN'T be gamed?
I could go on forever, everything can and will be gamed. The best Google can do is try and keep the really horrid 1 page affiliate sites out of the index, they won't be stopping good SEOs anytime soon. Hell, even quality raters can't stop it. You can't teach quality raters fast enough to be able to reconize link spam on high quality networks and web sites.
The one thing that could work IMO for Google is if they went into DEA mode and hired 100 or so people to infaltrate the SEO community, the real SEO community...not places like DP. In fact, from what I know they already do have a small team of people who are basically like little Google DEA agents that troll forums and communities to locate and nuke new/effective link building and web spam methods.
As for calling dude a sheep, sorry ;D
@ly2from that's a little too spammy and I hope you're clients have been fully briefed on the risk or else that is just plain unethical.
@randfish I get what you're saying and am frustrated as hell by low quality SERPS but if outing becomes acceptable then so will linkspamming competitors and fake outing them as well as leaving fake negative reviews etc
My clients hire me to do a job, which I do. I succeed 9/10 times and I don't get banned. I was banned once in Yahoo in like 2000 and I recent got a very heavy panalty from Google on one of my personal money sites. A side from that, no issues.
What I'd say being unethical is would be a client hiring you to rank them for a set of keywords and you not performing or giving a song and dance about ethics and white/black hat SEO.
Besides, I never do shady on-page SEO. Never have and probably never will. And when is the last time you've seen a site banned for the inbound links it gets? If so, then it's open season on my competitors, right? Fire up xrumer and give them 1,000,000 links over night and ta-da! No more competitor :D
Anyway, you keep being ethical and I'll keep ranking sites <3
@ly2from: I'd agree with you that Yoast doesn't appear to be without bias, and frankly I don't think GoDaddy did anything all that terrible aside from deceptive implementation.
But, that portion of your comments aside, this part bothers me:
"My clients hire me to do a job, which I do."
The type of link building you do on your own sites is your decision - you understand the potential downsides. But performing that type of work on a cllent's site, assuming that you're doing it without their knowledge, is flat out deceitful.
I hire my dry cleaner to get my shirts clean, but there's an implicit expectation that he's not taking them into the back room where child labor does the work. Not just because it's wrong, but also because I don't want to take the risk of being involved with it. Even if you tell me that the kids can get my shirts just as clean for half the price and it doesn't require any of that slow, white-hat dry cleaning equipment, that doesn't mean I'm suddenly on board with child labor.
If you give your clients a full understanding of the risks associated with your tactics and that they're receiving the alleged benefit of better rankings, then you've put the decision in their hands. It doesn't sound to me like that's the case.
"The type of link building you do on your own sites is your decision - you understand the potential downsides. But performing that type of work on a cllent's site, assuming that you're doing it without their knowledge, is flat out deceitful."
I have NEVER had a client site banned or even panalized in over 10 years. So why would I tell them a bunch of mumbojumbo to scare them? I would never do shady on-page SEO which is pretty much the only way they are going to get banned or penalized.
That's like a dentist reminding their patient that they could die during this root canal if something goes wrong. The patient would be freaked out because there is a 0.01% chance they may die during the root canal. What's the point? It's retarded.
"Flat out spam - 40%Private Network Links and in content blog posts - 40%Social Media like tweets/retweets/facebook shares etc - 10%Buying Links - 10%"
By your own admission, at least 50% of the link building you do is spam, which at the very least puts your clients at risk of having most of their links filtered and losing their rankings. How does that constitute a 0.01% risk? Unless you're covering up the spam with some quality links that you haven't mentioned, that's a lot of exposure.
"I have NEVER had a client site banned or even panalized in over 10 years. So why would I tell them a bunch of mumbojumbo to scare them?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
@ly2from - Wow. Frustrating to read, but do appreciate your transparency. I think my best reply would be to point to something I wrote earlier this year - White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works.
"I try hard, in my writing, my presentations and my professional contributions to this industry to be warm, generous and understanding. But, black hats telling the world that they turned their back on white hat because it's impossible is a load of crap, and I'm not feeling very empathetic toward that viewpoint."
While I agree that many things will be gamed, I think shining a light on them publicly will actually be far more productive than keeping quiet. Freedom of the press (and tenacity/quality of reporting) has a much greater impact on government corruption than laws that make corruption illegal.
@Netboost - I think you're misunderstanding what spam filtering does - these days, 99% of the time Google/Bing remove the value passed but don't hurt the site being linked-to. Given that's the case, there's hardly an incentive to give your competitors a temporary rankings boost and decrease; they'd probably even appreciate it (and it's usually very obvious when someone spams themselves).
Yes, I'm pretty good friends with Kris. I enjoyed the little slapping fight you guys had, it was adorable ;D
@randfish If a site has really good content but a tiny marketing budget compared to it competitors is it bad to use blackhat linkbuilding as you would be improving the SERPS quality with great new content to compared to shallow boring corporate pages that get an unfair brand bias.
You may be creating spammy links but none of those will be seen by a human. What else is a small fish in a bigpond to do if they can only spend 200 or so a month?
@ly2from you should be careful, if one of your clients get banned you could be facing legal dramas (has anyone heard of any lawsuits against seos for this?)
@Netboost:
"@randfish If a site has really good content but a tiny marketing budget compared to it competitors is it bad to use blackhat linkbuilding as you would be improving the SERPS quality with great new content to compared to shallow boring corporate pages that get an unfair brand bias."
Spam is spam regardless of whether it's pointing to a pharmaceutical scam or a wonderful charity that does great things in the world.
"You may be creating spammy links but none of those will be seen by a human."
I think the assertion that nobody will ever see it is an interesting one. Of course none of us wants to come across it day to day, but I still see plenty of poorly spun content ranking in long tail searches everyday.
Furthermore, spam is a form of pollution just like dumping chemicals into a river or fumes coming from a factory. It's an externality that affects society negatively and benefits the producer, but noone else.
This paragraph is a slight departure from link spam specifically, but there's also a huge unseen cost in the form of (a) energy and (b) human time. Many people and many servers spend time every day processing and deleting spam, email spam being the most common. I use Gmail so I rarely spend much time on it despite receiving 100s of spam emails daily, but there are plenty of corporations and individuals who rely on outdated spam filtering technology and still have to update white/gray/black lists and sort through hundreds of emails daily.
"What else is a small fish in a bigpond to do if they can only spend 200 or so a month?"
This is a cop out, just like @ly2from saying "if you have more than a couple clients it's literally impossible to do white hat link building as it takes forever to do it correctly and effectivly." Even if you buy into the concept that spam is part of a natural link profile, if you ever have any long-term aspirations for that website you're going to have to accept the fact that it will require quality content at some point, and some white-hat hustle to cover up your spam. Otherwise it's just a waiting game until your outed, manually caught, or algorithmically caught. There are too many free ways of link building and content promotion to try and make the argument that it can't be done on a small budget.
"@ly2from you should be careful, if one of your clients get banned you could be facing legal dramas (has anyone heard of any lawsuits against seos for this?)"
If I was his client, I'd certainly be contacting my attorney about defamation of character amongst other charges. That spam reflects on my website and my company, and that's without going into the issue of the cost of lost business if my rankings are ever affected. I'd have a darn good contract in place if I were doing that type of work for a client.
Thankfully that's not the type of liability that I open myself up to when working with my clients - they certainly can't sue me for making their business look better on the internet.
Wow. I left one comment and look what happened :D.
Great discussion, but I'd like to point out a few things:
@ly2from - what happens when Google makes a change that totally screws over everything you've always done? What do you tell your past clients when their rankings are in the dump? If what you say is true, your clients must be ranking pretty highly, so their dependence on their rankings is substantial.
Also, when you try and point out all those things that will be gamed, do realize Google has 20,000+ employees (that's as of 2009; just think 2012 #s). You might seem like you have it all together, but don't think this size of a workforce will just keep doing what they're doing, minding their own, letting the few (but seemingly proud) black hats walk the streets of the SERPs. If they find a quality indicator that is legitimate, or actually let me rephrase that - when they find a quality indicator that is legitimate, you're going to be in trouble.
Great discussion, but I just don't see black hat tactics as something that's worthwhile. I don't want to have the burden of waking up every morning to check if something happened to either my or my client's site.
@jrcooper: Thumbs up for saying "what happens when Google makes a change that totally screws over everything you've always done? What do you tell your past clients when their rankings are in the dump?" - Having read this thread in its entirety, I was going to say it if you didn't.
@ly2from: Fair enough if you're happy to be a spammer, and fair enough if it's working with you and you're getting away with it. But saying that "[your] clients hire [you] to do a job" but you don't tell them how you intend to do that job for them - which I'm assuming is the case because you didn't answer Joshua/Netboost's question - is absolutely crazy in my opinion. I think they have a right to know if you are doing spammy techniques and therefore, following that, a right to say "yes, we're fine with that, proceed" or "no thanks, we'll go with someone else," even if the SEO they approach in the latter example is someone who you think will not achieve the results by white-hat methods alone.
This is forcing Google in a direction I've seen them going in for a few years now.
Ikea is definitely one of the biggest furniture stores. Now imagine someone building 10x more links on an exact-match domain. Even if off-page and on-page of "furniture-furnitures.info" is better, Ikea still deserves to outrank it, simply because it is more relevant and safe for a query like "furniture".
So what can Google use to rank websites that can't be gamed? Real life data!
Does that make sense? In a perfect world Google would rank sites and companies on how big and relevant those sites really are. No matter the bolted-on SEO, companies will be ranked like they are ranked in the real world.
That should make it near impossible for someone from another country to outrank you with a more promoted website, for a local search.
If you want to continue gaming Google virtually, you'd also be required to game real life to back those bits and bytes up with real life verifiable data.
Fascinating to read this thread now, after Panda and Penguin updates in late Feb and April smashed the kind of low quality links that are being talked about as having 0.01% risk above. I'd be interested to hear what ly2from thinks about this now, and what happened when the updates hit?
I'm not saying this in a gloaty "ooh look how wrong you were" kind of way. The company I was working at previously was hit, badly in some cases, by the crack down on article distribution sites and private blog networks. I had decided to leave that that company because it was clear to me that these links would get chopped sooner rather than later, but my boss did not agree and was reluctant to admit his margins might get massively hit. Literally one week after I resigned, we got 100 messages in GWT - last week in Feb, on a day I won't forget! Talk about timing... and my decision to leave was confirmed to be a very good one.
Boom! Great debate.
I with you rand, no one is going to bully me into not protecting my interests.
I am more worried about providing for me and mine, not cowering to some internet mafia code.
Greetings Champions!
Forgive me, but it seemed appropriate...
https://www.quickmeme.com/meme/35j6x6/
Justin Smith
I disagree with Alex here, webspam and SEO are different. Although they may share some techniques and to a lesser degree intent the outcome in terms of site quality / end user experience is usually very different. A long term SEO strategy should result in a site which has valuable content for the end user (surely wiki is the ultimate example of this?) whereas, someone looking to make a fast buck generally speaking just looks like someone trying to make a fast buck.
If search marketing is to ever truly be accepted then all techniques must be open to public discussion without ridicule from others in the community. If you engage in spamming, fine, just don’t expect people not to talk about it if it works out for you.
I saw this going off between you both and after mentioning it in the office on Friday morning we ended up having the same discussion. This is the nature of what we do. It begs the question What is Spam? On the other hand if we shout too much about the things we are doing all the tactics become overused and it makes everything that bit harder.
It's all marketing at the end of the day, the more you do, the wider the reach.
I sometimes think about Google's motto "Don't be evil" and generally I think this is a good way to conduct yourself in business, I believe in a collaborative approach to business rather than a competitive approach and I would question if there could be better ways of outing businesses that use the more spammy approaches - especially if it's going to damage another persons business for no real gain.
Webspam should be open for public discussion in the marketing community.
that's what I choose. because it's the nature of internet: things are public, and only in this way we can learn more and more about things, good or bad they are.
Great conversation... Thank you for sharing it with us who may have missed it. I'm glad we were able to listen in.
I missed it. But got it now ;) Useful info here.
I have a website built in .php but we have converted it to .html by using "mod rewrite". Now the problem is my website shows up in both .php and .html. for example: www.mydomain.com/index.html and also www.mydomain.com/index.php. as per my knowledge its not good for seo purpose and also it may fall in duplicate content to search engines. so i want to keep only .html url live. how to do that?
The best place to ask questions is over in the Q&A forum. However the short answer is that you need to 301 redirect all the old pages to the corresponding new pages. You do this in the .htaccess file.
Very nice of you Dan!
Sammrat - good stuff about this here: https://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization, but please do leave questions to the Q+A section and post comments to the topic at hand. Thanks!
SEO ist eine Abkürzung von “Search Engine Optimization” und steht für die Optimierung Ihrer Website in Hinsicht auf den Traffic, den sie von Suchmaschinen wie Google, Yahoo, Bing und anderen bekommt. https://seosuisse.ch
Oh the irony! I'd like to add that not all SEO's in Switzerland are spammers.