If you’re link spamming, you suck. If you know someone who is link spamming, they suck — and you should tell them so. If you don’t know why you suck, here’s a story about the human impact of what you do.
About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site for woman called Boudica. You won’t find anything there now. The site’s closed due to a link spamming attack and will probably never reopen.
Lorna wanted a place where women could share stories relating to women but without a predominance of “mommy” content she’d found in some other places. Not finding what she wanted, she dived into creating Boudica.
She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.
Most of her time was spent dealing with the inevitable spam attacks that a community site faces. While her site had some defenses, this latest attack was too much. Someone decided the world needed another 500+ links about discount prescription drugs.
Wiping the links out would be fast work for a programmer that knows Drupal, which her site was based on. But that’s still time and money for a small site that hasn’t generated income. Plus, the version of Drupal that she’s running really needs to be upgraded to prevent future attacks. That’s more time and money that’s not likely worth spending.
If Boudica had been more successful, doing the work would make sense. But it has remained small, and the link spam attack will probably tip her over to a decision she’s already been debating, of whether it makes sense to continue working at it. She doesn’t want to feel a failure if she abandons it; my feeling is that she’s learned much from doing it, so look at it as a building block for future success.
Still, being small doesn’t excuse the attack. Nor do other excuses that typically get trotted out carry much weight with me, such as “You get what’s coming if you don’t have strong defenses” or “it’s Google’s fault — they created the link economy that drives this demand.”
No, the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed.
Ironically, I was in a debate this week where I was sticking up for the SEO industry (see SEO FAQ That’s Not From The Land Of Unicorns). To some, that means I’m sticking up for link spamming, since they see the SEO industry as synonymous with link spam.
SEO doesn’t mean link spamming in my book. There are SEOs who also link spam, clearly. Aside from hurting individual site owners, you give the entire SEO industry a bad name. You should stop. Or call yourself something else — perhaps link spammer would be a good title?
I’ve written against link spam before. Back in 2005, I tried to get some consensus that automated link spam ought to be condemned by those in the industry overall. One example I pointed out during that campaign was Mike Grehan’s classic story of fending off link spam of a memorial web site in 2004.
Seriously, who wants to stand up in defense of dropping links on a site dedicated to a dead man?
Who wants to stand up for causing someone (me) to take time away during Thanksgiving last year to deal with link spam (see Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already)?
Who wants to stand up for killing a site that a mother was making time for in between the already full-time job of watching her kids?
In the US, we got CAN-SPAM primarily to help get junk spam email in control. It’s helped, though clearly spam email hasn’t gone away. Still, I think the time is overdue to look at updating CAN-SPAM to include link spam. I intend to explore that further.
We shouldn’t need laws as a deterrent, of course. Basic human decency ought to be enough. Those who are link spamming should be able to ask themselves one simple question about what they’re doing and know they shouldn’t go forward:
Is that the type of thing you’d be proud to tell your own mother about?
Postscript: By link spamming, by the way, I include comment spam as that’s often done solely to gain a link.
Postscript 2: Peter, below in the comments, sees this as a crybaby post. It’s not. Let me clarify a bit more, if my points above didn’t make this clear.
I’m not naive. I understand that sites should have anti-spamming filters in place. Lorna’s had some. It could have more. But I’ve also seen spam get through anti-spam filters on my own Sphinn social news site. That site employs multiple-CAPTCHA barriers, along with an array of other deterrents. It also has human moderators. Link spammers still attack it. Link spammers will attack ANYTHING out there, and nothing is foolproof. The first programmer that tells you they have a perfect anti-spam solution will soon after encounter another programmer who will blow that fallacy out of the water.
For success with a social site, or any site that allows user-generated content (such as a blog allowing comments), you have to be prepared to fight spam. Lorna expected it and has been fighting it. She could, if she wants, get this latest huge barrage of spam cleared out on Boudica and improve spam filters going forward, if she choses. She’s currently debating this. It just may be, as I explained above, that this was the thing that tips her toward closing the site, something she was already considering because of low usage.
But the main point is that decision shouldn’t be something forced upon her through an act of vandalism. That on the web, I feel we kind of accept that this type of spam happens, and you have to live with it. It does, you do — but I’m hoping for more than the usual rant that is all those impacted by it feel they have. I’m hoping in a small way that some of those who engage in these actions take a moment to think further about what they are doing. Or that perhaps some who know others who link spam will send a message out to knock it off.
{ 94 comments }
Pablo, you think nofollow is worth the pixels used to print it in source? Because if you do, I have a bridge I want to sell you…
Sorry – just one more comment from me – and the project of changing human nature. It CAN be done – but I am not sure its easily possible on a global level. But on a local level you can indeed. Let me give you an example …
I live in Denmark. When I was young it was considered kind of cool to be able to drive your car home even if you where drunk. Cool right? No, it kills peaole. Real people die from drunk drivers! Its even worse than link spammers.
In Denmark we have spend a lot of money over the past 10-15 years to change that – and you know what? We have actually succeeded to a great degree. Today it is absolutely NOT cool to drive drunk among most people. Really, people here have changed. Off course not everyone – but the far majority have. Even most young people don’t think its OK anymore. I think most have seen too many dead teenagers by now to accept that kind of actions.
But it has taken many years to change people here. To do the same – with link spam – on a global level would take forever I think.
Alain, she hadn’t encountered such an onslaught before. That’s why she hadn’t enabled mod approval of everything. But I’ll repeat myself again, this post isn’t about security. I readily admit there’s more she could have done. I readily admit, everyone running a user site has to consider the spam issue. This is understood. It’s also not adding to the discussion I have here to keep raising it. That’s because even with the best security, you still have this onslaught out there because stuff still gets through. So I’d like to focus on reaching the people who do this, or those who know of them, about why this is such a harmful, unacceptable activity.
Look, we have freeway signs that get graffiti on them. You can put up barbed wire, and in some places you’ll have to. But you don’t constantly say the problem is we don’t have enough barbed wire up around the signs. At some point, you acknowledge that part of the problem is that we have bad behavior with some people out there, and that we need to also encourage a change in that.
Also, trust me, human moderation isn’t the guarantee you think it is. Someone will come along and put in 500 submissions by hand. They will, and they do. That pollutes finding the real submissions you want to approve. And yep, you can have other tools that will try to prevent this. And they get around those. Much can be reduced, I absolutely agree. But a little attention to the human side is what I’m asking in this post.
Pablo, automated tools don’t care about nofollow. They’ll fire off submissions in hopes of finding links in places that don’t use it. Not worthy checking, when they’re automated. Some people also don’t care. They’ll take the link, nofollow or not, just for the click off the page. Remember that some pages will rank for certain terms, so if you get a link on them, you’ll potentially get a visit.
Hi Danny,
I think you made your point by underlining that a normal person, simple web user (to be read: not a web related PRO – in this case your wife) cannot safely open his/her full-of-passion blog without being a spammer teams target. If that’s what you wanted to say, I totally agree with you.
However, IncrediBILL has an interesting comment here too. If you wish to create/maintain a website (no matter with type) you need a PRO to watch over it, to patch it, to keep it up-to-date with the latest technologies. This is not an excuse for spammers as I HATE spammers too, but that’s not gonna bring them down.
Link-spamming should be illegal – period. Forget about decent human nature or common respect or what defines a link-spammer. As long as low life spammers can get away with it they will continue to infect the entire internet.
If the FTC can loosely pass guidelines that go after marketers and bloggers for promoting whatever, then they have too much time on their hands. If they were actually enforcing and improving the CAN-SPAM Act and looking into bots designed to post, comment and email they wouldn’t have the time to delve into matters they don’t understand yet with no or little research.
As far as throwing insults like ‘cry-baby’, I’m pretty sure I seen this statement somewhere on this site, ‘This is Danny Sullivan’s personal blog”. I think that pretty much makes it where he can post anything he wants. To step into his home and start throwing rude comments is pretty pathetic, in my opinion.
With all due respect, this is just the cost of business in having a site up on the internet. Let me give you an example:
I open up a computer parts and supply store. I put a lot of hard work into marketing, treating my customers well, etc…
Guess what, because of the possibility of crime, I need to invest in security system for the store. Guess what, this is completely wasted money in the sense that it won’t add a dime to my bottom line and it will take time away from other more important things for me to research and install a suitable system. Now I can complain about this or just accept that its a part of doing business.
If 3 months later, my store gets robbed because criminals found a way to defeat or get around the security, then its my responsibility to upgrade. Stores get robbed all the time. You don’t see business owners throwing up there hands and giving up because it happens. (well, sometimes you do.)
My advice is to look at the world the way it is and stop complaining about how things should be. Of course in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to have locks on anything, but I’d be pretty foolish if I actually lived my life like that.
Sorry to sound so harsh, but your wife needs to get back up and keep marching forward. If this is something she’s passionate about, then take the time to prevent stuff like this from happening.
The link spammers are the ones that don’t give a shit about anyone or anything except themselves and their wallets. They are greedy, selfish slackers who have no idea what working for something means.
They are unaware of their surroundings and most probably too stupid to figure out that what they do hurts all of us…including themselves.
Anyway Danny…I’m right there with you…I am an SEO Crusader!!
Your anti-spam sucks, even if you think it doesn’t I have the free akismet anti-spam on multiple WordPress blogs, and it is effectively flawless. Disqus’ anti-spam is also terrific. Also, you can employ the rel=nofollow.
I mean, there are people I know who only use the hidden field anti-spam method and it totally works amazingly.
Even e-mail spam is no longer a real problem. I haven’t gotten an email spam get through a filter in ages. I can’t even remember the last time.
>paid blog anchor text
In general. I’m seeing moderately competitive top 3 slots on G go to well-managed, sustained programs of phrase buying. Easy to pick up if you look, the buyers even distribute the same post copy.
>this is aimed at those who actually do link spamming to try and get them to take a second thought.
As it turns out, I’m invited to a little private soiree (I’m getting in under the “Old & Harmless Pass). I’ll ask them nicely for you.
Many here seem to be missing the point. Perhaps some have come upon the scene in recent years, and imagine, “it was always this way.” It was NOT.
When I first got to know Danny (over thirteen years ago now!), Google and PageRank did not exist. Link spamming barely existed, and had no commercial value. Even the behavior of purposely disrupting other folks’ sites was relatively rare — limited mostly to “bad apples.” With only a little knowledge, you often could identify them (sometimes right down to where they were sitting).
Most important, in that world, those who behaved unacceptably knew they were doing so. All I see in Danny’s post today is a clear statement that current behavior is UNACCEPTABLE. If you already grok that, OK, go straight to Heaven — but many people apparently do NOT.
Comparisons to stores, houses, and so forth veer quickly off point. For thousands of years, every society has inculcated some common understanding of private physical property in every adult (indeed in most children), whether it’s respected it or not. A parallel awareness is not part of online culture.
Try your “lock it up” argument here: presume for a moment that buildings had only been INVENTED thirty years ago, and then only in small numbers. Consider that the first homes and businesses began appearing in buildings within our lifetimes; that burglars appeared only in the past fifteen years or so. Accept that your grandparents never saw a building — or that your parents have never visited one. Recognize that professional thieves only began organizing in the last ten years. In that context, many thieves — many people, everywhere — might have no common awareness that stealing from a building is wrong.
In that world — the one Danny is describing — you can install all the alarms and locks you want, but ultimately someone must say aloud, “Stealing is wrong.” Knowledgeable, visible authoritative figures must say aloud, “Stealing is wrong.”
Danny, from such a position, is saying, “Stealing is wrong. And damaging my house while stealing — damaging it so severely that I would consider abandoning it — is very wrong.”
Allen, as I keep saying, yes, you have to have security. Yes, you have to upgrade. Yes, you have to stay on top of it.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t complain about vandalism that happens on the web, and hope to change attitudes, any more than we would in the real world.
RC, please do ask them nicely
Gary, I completely agree with you. I know it’s just words and thoughts, but sometimes those matter. I think the SEO thought-leaders should make strong statements about ethics. At SMX Advanced 2008 one of the presenters said “You’re not moralists, you’re marketers. You gave that up when you came into the business. Do what it takes to get links.” and nobody called him on it at the conference. Lisa Barone wrote a great post on it after the conference http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/06/smx_advanced_goes_dark.html. The comment thread included statements like “I really wish we’d leave the ethics out of it and just talk risk.” We’re not going to get consensus on issues regarding gaming the algorithms. But Gary, I agree with your point that sometimes things have to start with people saying “stealing is wrong.” I hope this isn’t considered comment or link spam, but I wrote more about this on http://managinggreatness.com/2009/05/08/smx-advanced-black-and-white/.
>nicely
Will do, Danny.
Nice as I am, I’m expecting some minor push-back when I try to convince them to walk away from high-6-$digit annual income. I’ll just have to insist.
As for the “decency” angle, that doesn’t go very far, I’m afraid. They have about as much contact with the target as a droid pilot.
Gil, plenty of people disagreed with his view and called him out on it, including Google’s Matt Cutts later in the day on stage at that same conference, if I recall correctly. I wrote of many of my own thoughts as well.
Danny what would be your POV on comment spamming by the companies of speakers at SEO industry events?
It happens… they leave a great comment, sometimes even their real name, even an email address at their SEO company, but the link is to one of their SEO portfolio clients.
Thanks Danny, I didn’t remember Matt’s comments but I’ll take your word for it. Regarding your post that you link to, you wrote “I did consistently hear speakers — when covering blackhat tips — repeatedly warn that such tactics might be risky” and “anyone attending an advanced show should already know there are blackhat tactics out there, [and] have already decided what makes sense for them and their clients.” You also make that point in a comment on Lisa’s post “I also think most speakers were pretty clear about covering the risks involved.” But you’re only talking about risks and about “what makes sense” for you and your clients. Nowhere do I see in any of these posts or comments anything remotely like “If you’re link spamming, you suck.” Although I now see that in 2005 you wrote a post Can We Agree Automated Comment & Link Posting Is A Bad Thing?. And I see in the poll only 57% agreed while 22% said “unethical is too strong a word for me” and another 13% said “No — I just flat out dislike any declarations of standards. All’s fair in love and marketing.” So I guess I’m being naive. There is no consensus even on this. Danny, you’ve been fighting the good fight for a long time, and it’s terrible that your wife’s site was vandalized. I wish you success in stopping this.
Andy, my policy on links in comments is pretty straight-forward. I use the common sense rule, similar to Sphinn or at Search Engine Land. Links are fine if they are relevant to a post. Want to post a link in a comment? If that link really furthers the discussion, that’s cool. Want a link associated with your name? That’s fine if it helps me understand more about who you are or what you’re related to. Someone linking to their client? Yeah, I’d delete that.
Gil, one of the things I talked about earlier this year is the difference between black hat, white hat and crap hat.
Black hat typically means you do things that are against the search engine guidelines. There is, as I’m sure you’re aware, quite a debate on whether that’s actually bad for the user. You have people who cloak content and drive people to pages that are nonetheless relevant. You have people who buy paid links, feeling like the search engines helped create the link economy and have no right to tell people what they can or can’t buy. And the “morals” of that are get very difficult, especially when search engines themselves will knowingly overlook some transgressions if they think relevancy isn’t being harmed (say that all Flash site that might cloak content).
I wasn’t happy that we had a show where black hat topics were discussed among an audience of beginners. Nor was I happy that it wasn’t clear that the show itself wasn’t suggesting that people undertake black hat tactics. I think people should be aware of black hat stuff that happens. That doesn’t mean I recommend they do it. Actually, since I’ve first written about SEO back in 1996, I’ve recommended the opposite, that people stay within search guidelines.
That was the big issue I was dealing in my post. People weren’t coming away saying wow, this guy said there’s no morality, I’ll do anything. The main concern was whether “advanced” SEO meant being black hat.
Enter crap hat. We continue to have a debate between white hats and black hats. That’s why earlier this year I brought in the term craphat (see What’s A Craphat & Why You Shouldn’t Be One).
In contrast to black hat tactics, crap hat tactics really have no debate in my view. You can’t argue that relevancy is being helped despite violating search engine guidelines. You can’t argue that you’re somehow helping anyone. All you do with craphat tactics is, well, shit on the web.
My hope is that regardless of whether you’re a black hat or white hat in terms of search engine guidelines, you’ll agree no one wants to be a craphat.
Sorry to hear about your wife’s project “shut down”.
Used to be all we had to deal with was PPC (Pills, Porn and Casinos), but we are getting link spammed with everything under the sun. From vacation properties to furniture companies… and still the basic PPC.
I sent along an offer of help via this site, let me know…
Danny, I thought I’d explained in my post that you shouldn’t be required to install any security.
It’s the crap OpenSource software out there that isn’t properly secured out of the box causing all the problems.
I said, and I repeat, your wife was a victim of bad programmers, not spammers.
You can blame the spammers all you want but until the lazy ass programmers putting out this public domain garbage get off their collective butts and make their code at least %98 spam proofed the problem will persist.
I can be done but the lazy bums won’t do it.
Kind of like complaining about the people that write viruses when Windows is a pile of Swiss Cheese waiting to be infected.
Remember how Linux used to come with all the ports wide open and your server got hacked while you were still installing it?
Not the servers come locked down and pretty secure out of the box.
So why haven’t the OpenSource blog and forum providers gotten the hint?
It’s not rocket science.
P.S. I understand the social aspect you’re putting forth but with many of the kiddies it’s a game, just like War Games, you build it, they try to crack it. Therefore, the only way to stop the game is to step up the game of the programmers. The users are the victims and the shoddy programmers are the enablers of the spammers, hackers and crackers.
I agree, link spammers are scum.
But, it seems naive to assume that you can plop a CMS down in the middle of the wild west which is the web these days and expect it to sit there, untouched.
I’ve been using Wordpress for many years and have been overrun by link spam. Turning on various levels of moderation helps with this as does Akismet. For those who say that CMSs like Wordpress are too hard to keep up to date, Wordpress has had a one button updater in place for almost a year (the last few versions) and updating a site is quite simple now. It’s far from perfect but it has evolved over time to help us with these sorts of issues.
All of that said, one still has to be involved in a site: watch for link spam in moderation, send it off to Akismet, delete spam that gets through, etc. But, this is the kind of involvement that someone running a successful interactive site needs to have anyway, spam or no spam.
Even “self-running communities” need some sort of moderation and the most successful ones have it, less for spam, more for keeping people civil.
Link spam will get solved some day. What worries me more is aggressive troll-like commenting from human beings who just want to cause trouble and suck innocent people into arguing. Limaugh’s “project chaos” brought these folks out in droves and they sought out and attacked anyone on the left side of the great divide. However, once you get a taste for them you can block them too.
Hi Danny,
From your answer I think you misunderstood me when I commented about captchas. I’m not telling you that captchas work – just the opposite. There’s whole teams of Indians that can be hired from spammers just to fill in captchas in order to ensure the spam flows and the prices are more than reasonable – $0.60 for 1000 captcha submissions. So yes capthas work for bots but not for human bots.
This isn’t really about the Internet. Vandalism existed before the Internet, and the Internet is just another venue for it. I agree with you, it sucks. It sucks that I have to paint over graffiti on my building. It sucks that retailers must absorb the cost of alarm systems, security guards and “shrinkage” (and it sucks that we all ultimately pay for it). It sucks that I have to deal with comment spam.
Nothing should be forced upon any of us by vandalism, or crime in general. But that’s simply the way it is, and this is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.
To live life, you must be prepared to deal with this. Moreover, on a professional level, you must account for this factor in your approach to any business venture, online or offline. To do otherwise is just a head-in-the-sand mentality.
From a business perspective, I have to disagree with you and say that your post is somewhat pointless.
From a personal perspective, however, I enjoyed your post because it provoked thought, it perpetuates idealism, and it encouraged me to do more of that as well. Plus, misery loves company.
I am sorry for your wife. I also had ever the spamming problem on my blog. I agree that SEO is not spamming. by the way I wonder, do you the owner of dannyweb?
One thing I got from this was don’t use Drupal (or Joomla for that matter). I can’t even begin to tell you how often I’ve seen this happen on these platforms.
As you’ve no doubt realized, captcha and content moderation are poor substitutes for a service-based spam filter like Mollum or Akismet (both available in Drupal via community contributed modules). Should you decide to clean the spam out of the site database and take a stab at relaunching, I highly recommend Mollum. I’ve worked with several community sites with similar issues that halted immediately once Mollum was turned on.
Allen, the site did have Mollom in place
Sorry for your wife’s site, Danny. I disagree with Mikkel. If
CAN-SPAM is lame or too narrow, we should try to fix it. We should
put pressure on those who fuel linkspam with their marketing dollars,
and those who farm out SEO work to unscrupulous contractors. We should
also help small site owners to better protect themselves. Illegitimi
non carborundum.
It’s true, the web is getting more and more complicated. There are two main camps. Those that follow the patterns already set (or try to) and those that innovate and come up with new things.
There is a learning curve online, however. I do have to say WP currently handles spam better out of the box. For Drupal, I’d recommend just letting users leave comments and try one of the new captcha modules. Unless she’s on *gasp* 4.x or something?
Anyway, best of luck sir.
-kpaul
Im an editor of a site that was similarly hit by the attention of a group of these parasites. Turns out that theres a cottage industry selling a monthly list of sites that are ripe for this sort of exploitation (and the one that included our site has a charge of $5 for a monthly list of 30 sites, and has about 3000 people paying, so someone at least is making money out of this)having spent a couple of weeks fighting off the attentions of these fools we then went hunting through their forums to see what they are doing. in their community there seems a conviction that a) they’re doing nothing wrong, and b) the tag stops the link being followed, but dosnt stop it being counted for calculating numbers of links with search engines. now wether this is true or not is another matter, but its what the parasites believe. We did try warning people who were going to be hit, but till it had actually happened found it incredibly hard to get anyone to take us seriously.
Danny this is a must-read article. I hate spammers also. But I kinda like your style on promoting your blogs.
i totally sympathise, spam sucks and was the reason i took my ‘reality tv’ hater site down “vote em out” it seemed russians loved to spam my shout walls and ran up my databases to stupid sizes, even going so far as to try and hack the site which resulted in the data becoming corrupt.
Here you there Danny, I had to shut my forum’s down on 2 of my sites because of spammers. These were localized information portals for folks to find vacation related topics on Lake Winnipesaukee. It really bites people need to ruin your personal love. I lost interest in even trying. Takes to much to clean up all the BS links.
CAN-SPAM hasn’t helped one bit; in fact the problem is worse now as it’s made commercial spammers’ job easier.
I hear you with “they should be ashamed” etc… As much as that’s true, do you really think it accomplishes anything (other than personal satisfaction) to say that when this same problem already exists (and has for a long time) in other contexts? Look at “sign spam” for example. Drive down the road, any road, within an urban or ex-urban area in the U.S. and you will see people’s garbage tacked up on telephone poles, stuck into the ground next to the road, etc… claiming you can lose weight, get out of your mortgage, etc… Some are even put up by “legitimate” businesses if you can call them that. Most, if not all are illegal under various state statutes. Yet they persist…
What if someone stuck signs in your front lawn while you were away and there was no way to find out who did it. Then they kept doing it… They only reason this doesn’t happen is because it’s too expensive for someone to do. That’s not the case on the Internet.
It’s all a tangential tragedy-of-the-commons and it won’t stop until there are strong laws unencumbered by lobbyists’ demands backed up with strong monetary-based enforcement. What do you think the chances of that happening are?
It’s your fault for not integrating something to defeat the spam.
The world’s not a rosy place where unicorns and rainbows have tea parties every single day. People are out there to make money online, and if there’s a easy way to do it, it will be done.
Yes, Bill, I know the world’s not that way. I’ve said that repeatedly above. It’s like you read nothing above.
No Bill, it’s not Danny’s fault.
That would be like buying a new car and claiming it was Danny’s fault he’s picking bugs out of his teeth because he didn’t install a windshield.
Cars some with windshields to protect passengers and software should come with anti-spam measures built into them to protect users thwart the scumbags.
Hehe… OK, we know linkspam can be disruptive. BUT, which is more incomprehensibly frustrating? Linkspam (which at least must be making money for somebody) or folks who post without knowing what’s in the comments — or even in the freakin’ article! LOL!
Speaking of “real world ” comment spam…
http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2008/11/06/single-lawn-signs-conquer-the-american-landscape/
That page claims there’s at least $35 mil a year being made on those “dating in YOURTOWN” signs you see at intersections all over America. I’m surprised no one has tried to topple that empire yet…
-kpaul
Hey Danny, it is interesting to hear your story. My suspicion is that this problem may die down in the future, it would not surprise me if google, the driving force behind any such practices, starts penalising link spammers (if they aren’t already) and it will make people move onto something else. I.e. All comment links will be worth very little in terms of a vote for a site and comments with suspicious content will put the linked site in trouble with the big G. What do you think?
I just read your blog about your wifes website. I was wondering if your wife still wanted to work on a site that is work women. Our site is for new parents and of course women being one of them. We are looking for somone to develop content on our site. We are about to launch an updated website with more features. Please email me and let me know if this might work for your wife. Our Site is FreeGifts4Kids.Com
Thanks for you time.
Hi Danny,
First of all, I want to commend you for all the wonderful things you’ve done for the SEO community.
But second, I’d like to suggest you have been a bad husband here. You could move Lorna to Wordpress and benefit from WP Spam Free (Akismet gets too many false positives and allows too many bot comments in which have to be scanned so we don’t use it) which shuts bots down cold. We’ve also recently published a Wordpress plugin Thoughtful Comments which is really useful on websites with hot discussions like political and SEO sites (i.e. WP Spam Free takes care of the bots and Thoughtful Comments takes care of the trolls).
Next with Wordpress she can go to only approved comments appear automatically.
If you’d like some help moving this site to Wordpress, we are the number one in the world. We also do Moveable Type to Wordpress. Why not add Drupal to Wordpress?
We’ll take care of you.
As Lorna’s husband and a top web personality, it’s your duty to protect her from the spammers. And protecting her doesn’t mean one time rescues. It means putting in structural fixes which will protect her site today and tomorrow.
Why should your website be a properly maintained Wordpress site and Lorna’s site an out-of-date Drupal installation?
PS. Cool to see you here Mikkel and IncrediBILL. Just like the old Threadwatch days. Made me wonder how Nick Wilson was doing. He’s in a virtual world.
Alec, it was her project, not mine. She had her own programmer and oversaw her own work on it. And she did have some defenses in place, as I keep saying over and over again.
Yes, those could be better. And I don’t need to update them. She can have her own programmer do them, if she wants to put in some more time and energy on the site. It just probably not worth that time and energy at this point. As I also keep saying, she was kind of at a tipping point with it.
I’m kind of begging at this point. I don’t need any further comments about technological fixes that could be put in place. That’s why I’m going to close them now. I know that cold. That’s not what this post was about.
We discuss the tech fixes to death. Understood. People should be prepared for spam, and they should be prepared to improve their defenses constantly. I. Get. That. I agree with that.
Anyone who was about to comment on that point, STOP. Just stop for a second. Actually go back and READ what’s been discussed, clear your mind of your instant knee-jerk response.
What I’m saying in this post is DESPITE the need for tech fixes, there’s also an attitude change that should happen out there. That people who are doing link spam should take a hard look at the havoc they generate. That those who know them ought to give them a hard time about their activities. That while we can put up barbed wire to protect property, and we just might have to in the tough area of community-driven content, that still doesn’t make link and comment spamming acceptable.
I have never said in this post that people should expect a unicorn and fairy world of no spam. I have simply tried to illustrate for the few link spammers out there who might actually have some emotions that they have a terrible impact out there.
Anyone who wants to disagree, tell you what. Next time someone you know dies, say your mother, a friend, a child, let’s see if putting up spam defenses would be a top priority in your minds if you do a blog post about them. Hey, if you’re at the funeral and it turns out there’s 70 Viagra spam links that show up on your post about the funeral when you get back — because you failed to apply yet another update to WordPress or someone manually decided it was worth the time to get through your supposedly perfect spam filters — then be sure to do your own post about how it was all your fault.
Alternatively, maybe we can find room for a little humanity and common decency along with preparing for the worst.
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