They just don’t make music like this anymore, and it’s a shame. The sweet sound of rock’n'roll has never tasted better. All it takes is a reflective look at some of these song titles to realize that these guys knew their online marketing! (Though I’m sure they were all too wasted to even know it!)

SEO Requires Knowledge and Skill

I always seem to run into people who read a little about SEO and think It’s So Easy (Guns N Roses). Throw in a few meta tags and a title, and you’re all set, right? Actually, there’s more to it than that. What It Takes (Aerosmith) to perform SEO correctly is more than just a basic understanding of how search engines work. In fact, you have to be something of a Modern Day Cowboy (Tesla) if you want your pages to rank above the competition. A good SEO will Rock You Like A Hurricane (Scorpions), making sure you get the results you want.

Beware of Spammers Masquerading as SEOs

SEO has a pretty bad history with spammers. Heck, I think just about any SEO who has been in the business for more than a decade has spammed at least once! Back then we were Runnin’ With The Devil (Van Halen), but we really weren’t Foolin’ (Def Leppard) anybody but ourselves. When Google came on the scene, they gave us more than Looks That Kill (Motley Crue), they gave a hardcore Shout At The Devil (Motley Crue) and combated spam like nobody’s business.

Spammers today are a different beast than ten years ago. You could say back then it was just our Youth Gone Wild (Skid Row). Everything was new. Today, there isn’t so much ignorance going around. Every spammer is a Wanted Man (Ratt), not just to Google, but to all legit SEO’s out there.

Spammers: you’re not making the internet better. You’re cluttering it with your crap. People want to fall in love with websites, but You Give Love A Bad Name (Bon Jovi). And for that, well, you can just Burn In Hell (Twisted Sister).

But, the real problem with websites that use spam techniques is that, while they may rank well for a while, eventually they’ll go down in a Blaze of Glory (Jon Bon Jovi).

Your Audience Matters

In online marketing, there is such a thing as love at first site. Every first time visitor comes to you with the Eyes of a Stranger (Queensryche), and you have just fractions of a second to answer the question: Is This Love? (Whitesnake). If you give them love at first site, you’ve got a convert and a customer. If not, you lose.

For too long, the needs and wants of visitors have been ignored. Instead of falling in love with your site, they come thinking, “Please, Don’t Treat Me Bad!” (Firehouse). Your audience is more than just a traffic count or a conversion rate. They are your customers, your evangelists, your survival! You need to look at each and every customer in the eye and say “Oh, dear Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns N Roses), there is No One Like You (Scorpions) in all the world.

You have to take the time to know who your audience is and what they need. Then build your SEO and marketing strategy around meeting those needs.

SEO Is More Than Rankings… Conversions Matter

If you think SEO is just about rankings, Welcome To The Jungle (Guns N’ Roses) of online marketing. While businesses may tell you they want rankings, in reality, it’s conversions that are Wanted Dead or Alive (Bon Jovi).

A lot of SEO’s Runaway (Bon Jovi) from talking about conversions. They just want to bring you traffic, traffic, and more traffic. But, what’s the point of traffic without sales? You want your visitors to think of your site as Home Sweet Home (Motley Crue) and to be Still Loving You (Scorpions) from the time they land on your site through the end of the purchase process.

Content Matters

If you already know the importance of having strong SEO and conversion friendly content on your website, then you’re definitely Nobody’s Fool (Cinderella). Unfortunately, too many website owners still don’t get it. If you want your visitors to come Back for More (Ratt) then you have to give your content a Reason To Live (Kiss).

Content provides the justification your visitors need to complete the purchase. If you could hear your visitors thoughts, they’d say “Tell Me! (White Lion), Why are your products better? How is your service is more thorough? Can you meet my needs? Why should I trust you over your competitors?” In short, they’ll say, “Talk Dirty To Me (Poison), and tell me why I need you!”

If you can’t do that with great content, you’ll have a site that’s just like any other. Nothing special.

We All Need a Little Link Love

If you have a great website but nobody is linking to it, you’re Alone Again (Dokken). You might as well tell all of your grand marketing plans to “Kiss Me Deadly” (Lita Ford), because a new site without links might as well not exist.

When your sales-less website is asking you to “Pour Some Sugar On Me” (Def Leppard)… you better take heed. Your website just needs some lovin’. Good link marketing plans are not easy, nor are they cheap, but they are essential for new websites to be successful.

There is No Such Thing as Overnight Success

New websites are Too Young to Fall In Love (Motley Crue) with Google, or for Google to fall in love with them. And, even existing websites won’t see success in the Still of the Night (Whitesnake).

Good SEO takes time. Not just the implementation of a solid SEO strategy, but for the engines to translate all that hard work into good rankings. Once you have optimized your pages, you’ve got to have Patience (Guns N’ Roses). But, don’t just sit back and Wait (White Lion) for the magic to happen. Be proactive and continue to look for opportunities to improve your site for search engines and visitors.

You Can’t Set It and Forget It

SEO and website marketing is an ongoing process. Sometimes you feel like you’re going Round and Round (Ratt), but there is really more to it than that. It’s about continuously finding new keywords to optimize and fixing ongoing site issues as they are discovered.

Don’t Stop Runnin’ (Y&T) to your analysis tools to assess the on-page optimization, architectural, and usability issues. You may think to yourself, “Here I Go Again” (Whitesnake), but revisiting your SEO regularly is an essential part of achieving and maintaining SEO dominance.

Test and Analyze

The great thing about SEO is that it doesn’t always have to be a Shot In The Dark (Ozzy Osbourne). Routinely looking through your analytics software to see if you’re visitors love you, hate you, or are In & Out of Love (Bon Jovi) with you is important. Sometimes you make a change to help improve search engine rankings, but it turns into Bad Medicine (Bon Jovi) for conversions. You don’t have to ask each visitor to “Tell Me What You Want” (Zebra), you can let your analytics do the talking.

You Can’t Always Be #1

In the world of SEO, Every Rose Has It’s Thorn (Poison). Sometimes there is a very delicate balance between top rankings and better conversions, or rankings for one keyword vs. another. You simply can’t expect to be #1 for every keyword, or that your #1 ranking will produce as many conversions as a better targeted #2 ranking!

Everyone wants to be on the first page. But, sometimes you have to accept being Seventeen (Winger) for one keyword if that helps you improve another keyword that drives more traffic or conversions. Some keywords are better as a Fallen Angel (Poison) if they don’t contribute to profits.

Good SEOs Thinks Outside the Box

Good SEOs will have a bit of a Wild Side (Motley Crue). They are always on the look out for The New Thing (Enuff Z’Nuff) that is going to help their clients gain profits. Notice that I didn’t say better rankings! That’s a part of it, but profits matter most. Anyone telling you otherwise is involved in some Monkey Business (Skid Row) and can go Jump (Van Halen) off a cliff. Outside the box SEO is usually results driven SEO!

There Are No Guarantees

If you’ve been around SEO long enough, you know that, ultimately, you’re just Livin’ On a Prayer (Bon Jovi) that Google doesn’t screw with their algorithm so much that you lose all your rankings. There is nothing worse than getting figuratively tossed aside like a Rag Doll (Aerosmith) while Google is Bringin’ On The Heartbreak (Def Leppard). It makes you want to Bang Your Head (Quiet Riot) against the wall while screaming out, “Somebody Save Me!”(Cinderella), as the Tears Are Falling (Kiss).

But, that’s the risk we all take. This is why having secondary online marketing strategies is essential!

Sweet, Sweet Success

Properly implemented SEO and additional online marketing strategies will, ultimately, bring the sweet flood of success as you see rankings, conversions, and sales pushing their way upward. When all your online marketing efforts are going well, you’ll think Heaven’s On Fire (Kiss) while you’re living in Paradise City (Guns N’ Roses)!

Someone took one of my articles and re-translated it through their automated spam-text creator. I’m sure you’ve all seen something like this a dozen or more times but it made me laugh out loud. The original article is here, and below is what I like to call the Web 2.no version. I’ll refrain from linking to the spam blog, even with a link condom. No sense sending them traffic!

I’ve had some clip to see Google’s new cosmopolitan hunt that they are implementing in their hunt results. What I see do me believe of this in footing of hunt goulash.

Mmmm! a (not-so) dainty combination of everything I didn’t desire in my hunt with some material I did thrown in.

First a small Hungarian goulash background. Growing up, Hungarian goulash was a dish my female parent made that was essentially all of the week’s dinner left-overs combined into one (not-so) dainty dish. We awful Hungarian goulash nights, but Supreme Being bless my mother, she wasn’t willing to blow any food!

This is what cosmopolitan hunt reminds me of. Everything that everybody wishes thrown in, but nil that most people would happen tasty. Google realized that very few people were using their individual hunt countries such as as images, video, news, etc, and cosmopolitan hunt is their one-size-fits-all fix to that. The consequence is a clump of, what I would see to be, irrelevant hunt results. I understand what Google is trying to accomplish, I’m just not convinced this is the best approach.

When I desire to purchase something I typically don’t desire videos, or images, or books about it, I desire a land site that sells it. If I desire information, then some of those other options might be nice, but again, mental images of what I desire are not going to assist much. Whatever hunt I execute I pretty much cognize what type of information I’m looking for, whether that be to buy, larn more than than about, watch, see, etc. Universal Joint hunt is premix of just about every type of hunt in one place, regardless of the seekers desire.

Perhaps better integrating of those verticals would have got been more appropriate. Google expirimental hunt acquires this right. Just to the left of the hunt consequences are golf course to their other verticals. Maybe instead of just linking to those verticals as seen in that nexus above they could supply the #1 consequence for each under the perpendicular heading. This would supply the same basic conception of cosmopolitan hunt without forcing them into the chief hunt area, while also giving seekers more seeable options.

Maybe I’m the odd adult male out, but when I seek I cognize what sort of information I’m looking for. Google doesn’t and cosmopolitan hunt seeks to repair that by being all things to all people. The consequence is merely less of what anybody really wants. And in this case, less isn’t more.

While we are on the topic of odd sightings, this has nothing to do with us!

1. Duplicate Story
2. Spam
3. Wrong topic
4. Inaccurate
5. OK, this is lame

Let’s take these one at a time:

Duplicate story: Reasonable enough. If the story is a dupe of another recently dugg article then there is cause for it to be buried. Better, though is for Digg admins to verify if a story is duplicate and simply remove it. End of story.

Spam: What’s spam? Is it poorly written? A commercial advertisement? Full of grammatical errors? Let’s define what spam is instead of allowing each digger to define spam as “something I don’t like.”

Wrong topic: Is that really a reason for an article to be buried? How about someone moving it to the right topic. Wrong topic doesn’t mean “not valuable.”

Inaccurate: This is kind of broad. I can write about SEO and be considered inaccurate by five others and highly accurate by ten more. Flag articles as potentially inaccurate, but don’t bury them.

OK, this is lame: Lame? Lame to who? Talk about alienating a large segment of the population. Flagging stories as lame only creates a clique of diggers who only enjoy one kind of story. Digg should want to broaden their audience. What’s lame to one audience is a goldmine to another. Unfortunately, that other audience will never find Digg interesting because the current crop of “news” is lame to them.

So all this got me thinking. If Digg.com was subject the the digging game, would it survive? Vote for yourself:

Notice here how we started with the Final Notification. Where was the first or second notification. Just jump right into the triple dog dare!

According to them, I have not logged in for some time and my profile needs to be updated lest my account be purged from the database. Funny I don’t remember ever joining, but I’ll play along. I click the big red link and am taken to a login page. My email address is already entered in so I put in my password. Or what I assumed would be my password:

No record? How is that possible? They sent me my final notice! My email address was already entered in? Oops, if you’re going to lie about someone already having an account, perhaps its best that you don’t tell them otherwise when they get the password wrong!

So I go back to the email and realize that they have conveniently provided both my user name and my password for me. Imagine that, they sent my password to me in the same email as my user name. At least I know they are serious about the integrity of their system.

On the second try I use the password provided (one I would never have used had I created the account for myself) and get logged in. The first thing I see is this:

That about had me on the floor in hysterics. I can get #1 on Google and Yahoo just by joining FastPitch. To hell with this SEO nonsense, I’m in! You gotta love the balls on these people.

By now I’m wondering the process that came about to get me on their spam list. The original email provided me a few clues.

First, we changed our domain about two years ago. The one in the email has been redirected since around may of 2005. And look at that awesome description of my business. Sounds familiar. Yep, sure enough that was the title of a press release we submitted in April of 2005. Wow, talk about keeping their database current! Wouldn’t it have been easier to pull the meta description from the website itself?

Sigh.

So there you have it folks. A lesson in how not to do business with people smarter than you. But hey, it looks like a really good opportunity. I just hope I updated my profile in time!

• As much as 91% of all email is now spam. – Postini, November 2006
• Daily spam volume is up by 120% over last 12 months. – Postini, November 2006
• In October 2006, image spam accounted for 25% of all spam. – IronPort Systems, October 2006

So, speaking of things that people say, but don’t quite know what they mean, I got this email in my mail box the other day:

We cant find your web site.

Stop the tape!

Editors note: Another free EMP book to the first commenter to get that reference!

Hmmm… can’t find my website? That begs the question, how did you get my email address? OK, lets play fair here, suppose they found my email address on some forum, or another website, or some other place that’s NOT my website. Is it really plausible that they could still not have found my website considering my email address is @polepositionmarketing.com and my website is www.polepositionmarketing.com?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Roll tape.

Do you have top positioning on the major search engines? If not – we can change that for you today.

Stop the tape. So now they are asking me? I thought they couldn’t find me (I have to make the assumption here they meant through the search engines.) But now they are unsure, maybe they actually could find me if they tried (which of course they already did). But hey, I’m glad they can get me top rankings today. Not tomorrow, today!

Roll tape.

You can have the best positions and stay there indefinitely. Our prices are rock bottom and our methods are unbeatable.

Stop tape. Rock bottom prices? Unbeatable methods? There are a few things in life I won’t pay “rock bottom” prices for. Lawyers, doctors, concrete work and SEO. You get what you pay for with each of these.

Roll tape.

Better – we will PROVE it. Interested?

Ah, no.

But now I’m wondering… maybe they really didn’t find my website. If they had, they’d know that we offer proffessional search engine optimization services. But we don’t offer rock bottom prices, just superb service and results.

The peak of excitement from an SEO’s sudden release of pent up frustration regarding the tactics of other SEOs who’s practices they condemn. Characterized by strong feelings of pleasure often following a blog or forum posts of some kind. Can be accomplished as a solo act but is often found to be more pleasurable in group settings such as online forums or blogs.

SEOrgasms can lead to the spread of false or misleading information and/or moral superiority and therefore a link condom should almost always be used.

We all hate spam, don’t we? Nothing slows up your morning like having to sort through hundreds of junk emails, just to find the handful that are of a genuine business nature. Thank God for commercially available spam blockers like cloudmark, that will sort through your email as it’s being downloaded and remove all the junk for you. Most web servers also allow you to set your spam settings to one of several levels of strictness and remove or mark email as spam for you. Spam sucks, but life is good when you have a good spam blocker.

There are two things I don’t understand about email spam, 1) why people complain about it when there are a host of spam blockers available for cheap or free? and 2) why some feel the government should get involved in regulating spam when there are a host of spam blockers available for cheap or free? The only real problem I see with spam, other than the minor annoyance of it, is the fact that we don’t have more spam blockers for other things.

Spam Blockers for Life Outside of Email:

Telephone Spam: I guess you could say that the government’s “Do Not Call” list is a spam blocker for the phone, but there was another telephone spam blocker available long before that came along. It’s called Caller ID. That’s right, if you know who’s calling, you can decide whether to even pick up the phone in the first place. What do you do about telemarketing firms that block their numbers? Don’t pick up the phone! Who says that I have to answer my phone? Will I miss any important calls? Not likely because I have another telephone spam blocker called an answering machine which allows me to screen calls. What great spam protection!

The business telephone works a bit different because many companies cannot add caller ID to their systems, nor can they screen their calls with an answering machine. Short of that, you don’t want to ignore calls just because you don’t know the source, as they will cause a loss of business or result in unhappy customers. This is where I’m happy with the government’s “Do Not Call” list. I don’t see any other viable options here, so let’s give three cheers to government intrusion!

Postal Spam: Why doesn’t anybody complain about postal spam and how can I opt out of it? Credit card offers, realtors trying to get me to sell my house, grocery store coupons that I’ll never use, and let’s not forget all the advertisements included in the envelope with my bills! Why can’t we get a spam blocker for this?

Fax Spam: If you have ever published your fax number someplace, you probably get one or more pieces of fax spam every day. Fax spam is far worse than email spam because not only does it use up my time, but it also uses my resources. Ink/Toner, paper, wear and tear on the machine. What right do these people have to use MY resources for their garbage? I’ve added my fax number to the government’s “Do Not Call” list but to no avail! It’s time to end fax spam now!

Resume Spam: There is another kind of spam, and anybody who has ever posted a job opening has undoubtedly received quite of few of these either via email, phone or walk ins. It’s resumes from people who don’t read the job requirements first. I’m not quite sure I understand how this kind of spam happens, but with each job posting we inevitably get dozens of emails from unqualified or over qualified candidates, neither of which read the actual job description. On the one side, your job ad says that knowledge or experience in such and such is a must, then resumes come in from people that have no such knowledge or experience. On the other side your job ad says something like “entry level” and people with Bachelors Degrees apply, when they know they wouldn’t even take the job if you tried to give it to them. Fax spam is a strange beast, and one that continually perplexes me.

Fast Lane Spam: This is probably the most frustrating form of spam; people who go slow in the fast lane and make you pass them in the right lane, if traffic allows. In my experience this form of spam is most common in California, but Nevada has its fair share of fast lane spammers as well. The worst of these spammers are those that suddenly get offended when you try to go around them on the right and they speed up so you can’t pass. What’s with that? Is their ego going to be so bruised if they get passed? Personally I think it’s their own recognition that they should not be in the fast lane in the first place; and getting passed on the right is clear evidence of their discretion, which they try to cover by speeding up. Cops should be our spam blockers here but unfortunately they don’t seem to care about his kind of spam… instead targeting speeder spam.

These are just a few areas where the next generation of spam blockers is needed. Got any more ideas for a daily life spam blocker?

I am just starting an internet business and I am looking for the following services. Please let me know if these are services you can provide and if so an estimated cost. Thanks

1. Website Analysis to check the current status of your website.
2. Meta analysis and recreation of clients tags and keywords.
3. Link popularity program – Increase the amount of pages that link to you.
4. Automated Submissions to 1090 search engines for site indexing twice a month.
5. Manual Submissions to the search engines that don’t accept automated submissions.
6. Submissions Report on the 1st and 15th of each month showing the progress of the website. “upon request”
7. We build you a Site Map for your website which helps all of your pages to be indexed into the search engines. The site map will also be submitted to 1090 search engines for site indexing twice a month.

My first response was to simply hit the delete button. If these guys were looking at a $20 junk SEO service then they were not going to be anywhere in the ballpark for the professional search engine marketing services we provide.

I could go through this line by line and pick it apart, but I won’t simply because it’s already obvious to anybody who knows anything about true optimization. Suffice to say for those who don’t, that almost all of the “services” mentioned above range from mostly useless to completely useless. Link building is important, but without knowing more about their methodology, there is no way to know if there is value in that service. I suspect not, based on their “submissions to 1090 search engines.” That’s a service that is not even worth the digital space it takes up to be able to read it. It’s clear that this is not an SEO that knows anything about what SEO really is.

Unfortunately, there are far too many of these faux SEO providers out there. The knowledge of these SEOs differ, some know enough to talk a good game, others know enough, or are good enough salespeople, to be able to sell a sham service. In either case, these are the SEOs that give the industry a bad name.

I went ahead and called this prospect and I’m glad I did. No, I wasn’t able to sell them our service and hadn’t expected too, but I may have prevented yet another business owner from being turned off to the SEO industry as a whole. What I was also able to do was to provide some education as to what they can and should do now and later in regards to promoting their website properly.

The bottom line for them was they didn’t have a lot of money to invest in promotion. Now, frankly, I think anybody who thinks they have a strong business idea needs to do whatever they can to secure the financing necessary to market their website properly. But it’s also true that there are many things that can be done to get your business model working with little or no cash.

Since this no-longer-a-prospect’s website was new I mentioned to her that new sites almost always take a long period of time to start ranking well. She can get on Yahoo and MSN relatively quickly in some cases but with Google, it will be a long road. What she needs to do now is to generate some exposure. Paid ads are the quickest and easiest way to do this.

I have also suggested paid ads to other potential prospects that were unsure whether or not they had a viable business model. First of all, unless you are sure, it is probably best not to pour money into expensive, long-term contracts. Paid ads via Google and Yahoo are an ideal means to start producing traffic to your site and see if your business model (and website) works. If not, change the model or pack it in.

If you have a good business model, the exposure you gain from Google and Yahoo through paid ads will not only start producing income (if not a profit) but will also start getting people to your site. The more people that see it and like it, the more likely you are to start generating some natural links. Links are the first step in the process of getting search engines to your site to build search engine rankings.

Another thing I told her she could do is to write and submit articles to article banks. If well-written and informative, these articles will likely be re-distributed on a number of websites, and if you create a good bio, they’ll link to your site as well. Those who read the article may visit the site and those who visit the site may link to it, creating even more incoming links.

Do this for six to twelve months and you now have site that has “aged” enough that a professional optimization campaign will be able to achieve some good rankings. It may take significantly longer to rank well for competitive phrases, but you should be able to target and rank well for enough keywords to produce an additional stream of targeted traffic, thereby boosting sales.

With any business, research is the key. One in ten businesses fails (online and off), largely because of a lack of funds and lack of research. If you are undercapitalized, research is even more important because this will help you make wise decisions as to where you put your money. It will also educate you enough to be able to identify which services are scams and which are legitimate.

I provided this prospect some knowledge that I hope will help guide her to build a successful business. And, since I was honest, willing and able to provide this information, who knows… maybe she will become a client at some point in the future.

Last year Google introduced the “nofollow” attribute for links. Using this attribute on a link is supposed to inoculate the linking site from any negative association to the site being linked to. It’s to be used when you are not in control of the link being posted (as in blog comments) or when you don’t want your link to a site to be considered as you “vouching” for that site in the eyes of the search engines. I think the most accurate description of the “nofollow” attribute is that it’s a link condom.

The nofollow was merely a band aid fix to one kind of blog spam, but not a solution to the real problem. But since there is not just one kind of blog spam there is no single solution either.

Blog Comment Spam:

Every now and then I get inundated with comment spam to my blog. These comments are usually posted by automated programs that put a short message in your comments that reads something like, “I like your site, lots of good info. Check these out…”, followed by about 5-50 links to their websites.

You like my site? Oh, wait… hehe, you almost had me there!

Thanks to my blog software, the nofollow tag is automatically added to all links in the comments. So even if I didn’t have the moderation feature turned on requiring me to approve all comments before they post, the link itself will not be of value in the eyes of the search engine. And obviously it’s of no value to the reader, either.

But I always assumed that most bloggers would be like me and have some sort of comment approval policy in place. But then I forget, there are a lot of people running blogs for personal stuff and they simply don’t understand the whole spamming thing. So blog spammers take advantage of the ignorance of these bloggers and blast them with junk comments. And if their blogging software doesn’t use the nofollow tag in links then they just got themselves a link that some search engines (coughMSNcoughYahoo!cough) would record as valuable.

There are two possible solutions here. 1) all bloggers stop allowing comments without approving them. This is unlikely to happen. 2) Search engines find a way to devalue all comment links in any blog whatsoever. This will be unfair to legitimate commenter, but as often happens, the many suffer for the ill-conceived actions of a few.

Scraper Spam Blogs

There are many sites and blogs that are nothing more than a regurgitation of someone else’s content. Some are providing a valuable service by being a news distribution source, but many others are not.

The legitimate ones publish free to re-publish articles from article banks on their site and keep the author info and bio (and links) in place. They also often republish press releases which are also in the common domain. For these types of sites there is nothing illegal being done. I don’t have problem with these types of sites because they do provide a way for articles such as this to reach a wider audience, a better site is one that takes this information and adds their own comments and reviews. This is providing a real service to their readers by giving their own opinion, not just the regurgitation of others.

But there are a great many blogs and scraper sites out there that steal content and don’t give proper attribution. They either republish a summary of articles (sometimes linking to the source, sometimes not) or publish the full article but remove the author and bio info. Still others run the article through a rewrite software program so they can publish “unique” content on their site, even though it’s still stolen content.

I found one of these content thieves just the other day. They are a web hosting company that “re-published” my article, “Selecting a Web Host Provider that Meets Your Needs”. They also forgot to keep my bio information that came with the article and also failed to attribute authorship. I’ve sent them one email and, lacking any sort of response, I will contact Google and their web host provider informing them that this site is stealing content in violation of copy write. The ISP will be obligated to pull the site down until they have corrected the breach.

Many of these kinds of sites often run ads provided by Google or Yahoo, or both in an effort to profit from some other person’s hard work. In the case of the above, they are using my article to help sell their services.

To eliminate this kind of spam, these kinds of sites need to be found and removed from search engine indices AND the ad division of the search engines need to refuse to allow these sites to publish their ads. The former is more difficult from the latter, but upon finding such sites, I think search engines have an obligation to remove them.

Faux Information Blog Spam

This is one that I’ve noticed just recently. People setting up blogs at the free blog services such as blogger.com or blogspot.com, throwing up a post all about their site, and then creating multiple accounts so they can post comments that look like they come from others, or ask friends and family to post comments for them. All these comments somehow find ways to included links in back to the site which the blog is promoting. Neither the blog or it’s “comments” contain any real relevant information. At best it’s a commercial. At worst its Internet feces. (Yep, link condom used here.)

These kinds of spammers don’t care how high their blog ranks for any particular keywords, but they use it to provide link value back to their own, or their client’s website. With these free blogger services you can throw up dozens of these fake “on topic” blogs all with a link back.

The solution here relies solely in the hands of the search engines. It’s up to them to discount all these types of blogs as well as their links. Unfortunately, the many search engines still seem to eat this stuff up as legitimate.

The problem with all blog spam is that it relies on SEO “tactics” that the search engines hate. Sometimes a nuisance, sometimes illegal and almost always results in more garbage on the Internet. There is nothing worse than having to wade through someone’s garbage to find good quality information. But one thing is for sure, for as long as blog spam works, one man’s garbage will continue to be a spammer’s goldmine.

Subject: Link exchange with your site http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/006390.html

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Nicolas Arrighi, and I run the web site:

http://www.linking-service.com/

I recently found your site http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/006390.html and am very interested in exchanging links. I’ve gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:
The following Link no longer works

http://www.linking-service.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_link_popularity_.html

If you’re intered exchanging links, Please post a link to my site as follows:

Title: Buy links – improve link popularity
URL: http://www.linking-service.com/
Description: We offer different link popularity services to build your link popularity. Our link popularity services are affordable. buy links to improve web site traffic and search engine rankings.

Once you’ve posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it’s on, by entering it in this form:

The following Link no longer works

http://www.linking-service.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=OTE0NjI3

You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your site, if you’d like.

Thank you very much,

link-machine@linking-service.com

PS. I’m working very hard with my staff on building the link popularity of linking-service.com, and I expect PR5 in next google update on the 1st april. Exchange links will benefit both of us.

Did you read the whole thing? I sure didn’t. In fact, I didn’t get past the subject line before I started laughing. Anybody with half an iota of a brain cell would know that this isn’t my site, they have only published my article.

Nicolas wins the EMP award for Dumbass of the Month!

But today I got a Valentine’s greeting from GoDaddy (how sweet of them) in my mail box. I can use my cloudmark toolbar to mark it as spam, but I know that I signed up with GoDaddy so I’ll do the polite thing and unsubscribe through their own system.

UNSUBSCRIBE INSTRUCTIONS
You are currently subscribed as: xxxx@polepositionmarketing.com.

If you do not wish to receive our special notices, please unsubscribe here.

So I click that, and guess what happens? I get this:

The email address “xxx@polepositionmarketing.com” was not found in any of our lists.

Try going to the “Update Customer Information” area located under “My Account” to change your account settings.

But I don’t have a GoDaddy account! So I guess this means I’m stuck on their list with no way to remove myself. Oh, wait… I go back to the email and find this:

…unsubscribe here, or mail us a written request to the attention of: GoDaddy.com Customer Contact Manager, 14455 N. Hayden Rd, Ste. 219, Scottsdale, AZ 85260.

It makes we wonder if their system deliberately won’t allow me to unsubscribe.

GoDaddy, we broke up a long time ago… now you’re just stalking!

We often distribute articles to various industry news and information sources and find that those articles are republished on many additional sites. This is good as it gets our articles out to a much larger audience, and each contains a link back to our site so the readers know who wrote it and can then find out more about us.

There are, however, some lower forms of content republishing that occurs online, everything from outright theft from your website to republishing pieces from various forms of free content as a means to create search engine rich, but otherwise useless, pages.

I found another form of this content pilfering this morning (and it wasn’t the first time I found something like this on this particular website). What they have done is taken one of our press releases, which is free for anybody to republish, and ran it through a program that rewords it and spits out a completely “new” version of the press release.

Here is the reworked version of the content:

CodeMonitor is a helpful tool for all web masters, search engine marketers, and search engine optimisation owners. It is used to monitor, modify or track changes done in a webpage either by the web marketer, programmer, client or a competitor. It does the monitoring on a daily basis side-by-side its code comparison.

Stoney deGeyter, company president of Pole Position Marketing (maker of the CodeMonitor tool) said that there are times when changes made to a Website create farthest influence in the marketing campaign, which leadingly can either be productive or the other way.

Anybody can use CodeMonitor. It even permits web professionals to dwell surpassingly the latest changes to their websites.

deGeyter further stated that CodeMonitor is essential for all webmasters, SEO clients, SEOs, PPC account managers, web marketers and business competitors to be given notice if there were changes done to any Website under oversight. “CodeMonitor allows notifies you within 24 – hours of such changes occurring”, deGeyter said. “It is a very smart programme. It makes it easy to see what changes are being made to your site—for both good and for bad.”

The programme operates by grasping a snapshot of the HTML on user specified Web pages. After which it goes back and examine similarities or differences of the recent code to a prior saved version on a daily basis. If after comparing the two versions show differences, the user will automatically receive an e-mail.

CodeMonitor permits users to hold and not let get off-track of the Website of a competitor. This allows the user to know what are the changes done and performed as they aim for better competition toward certain search engine rankings and higher conversion rates.

The tool further permits its users to block out the parts of the Web page that are made up-to-date automatically. Through an exclusion comment tag being inserted, users can even ignore the content like RSS, news feeds, rotating ads or current dates that are scheduled regularly.

With these features, CodeMonitor is one tool that people in the ecommerce business must have to improve returns and increase profits.

My only response was, “Huh?”. Okay, it kind of made sense in a one-week-out-of-an-English-as-a-Second-Language-class sort of way. I especially like the quotes attributed to me:

“CodeMonitor allows notifies you within 24 – hours of such changes occurring”, deGeyter said. “It is a very smart programme. It makes it easy to see what changes are being made to your site—for both good and for bad.”

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I never said that. Here is the content of the initial press release:

Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a leading provider of Internet marketing strategies and website promotion, has unveiled an innovative online tool that alerts users whenever changes occur to a website.

Available as a free-to-use tool, CodeMonitor allows web professionals to stay on top of the latest modifications to their website(s)—even unwanted developments—soon after they occur.

“CodeMonitor is an essential tool for webmasters, SEOs, SEMs and site owners to be notified of changes made to any website under their oversight,” said Stoney deGeyter, company president. “Sometimes a change is made to a website that can ultimately affect the marketing campaign. CodeMonitor allows you to be notified within 24-hours of such changes occurring.”

With webmasters, clients, web marketers, PPC account managers, and countless others in charge of a single website, there is a growing need for this type of online tool, as it is able to keep users up-to-date and informed of important website changes.

By taking a snapshot of the HTML on user-specified web pages, CodeMonitor is able to go back and compare recent code to a previously saved version on a daily basis.

When the two versions show differences, an email is automatically sent to the user. After logging into the CodeMonitor account, the user can view a side-by-side HTML comparison with differences between the saved version and the live version highlighted.

CodeMonitor also lets users block out portions of a web page which are automatically updated. By inserting an exclusion comment tag, users can ignore regularly scheduled content like RSS, news fees, current date or rotating ads.

“It’s a very clever program,” said deGeyter, “it makes it easy to see what changes are being made to your site—for both good and for bad.”

In addition, CodeMonitor allows users to keep track of a competitor’s website to see what changes they are implementing as they compete for better search engine rankings and higher conversion rates.

Especially attractive for SEO and SEM specialists, CodeMonitor has the ability to monitor and notify subscribers of site changes made by clients—changes which could potentially affect a website’s optimization. CodeMonitor can be accessed for free at: http://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/

ABOUT POLE POSITION MARKETING

POLE POSITION MARKETING is a search engine marketing firm specializing in search engine optimization (SEO). The firm customizes their services to each client to define targeted keywords and improve the company’s rankings for each of those keywords in order to drive targeted traffic to their website. The ultimate goal of these optimization strategies is to increase web-based sales and maximize the company’s return on investment. Pole Position Marketing has been a leader in web promotion strategies since 1998 and has clients worldwide.

You’ll notice how the real press release directs readers to the actual tool that it is announcing. Novel concept, but the regurgitated version contains no links to either our main site OR the tool. Nor do they reprint the “About Pole Position Marketing” information.

So what good is this information on this site? Not much really. I’m sure it’s not meant for human consumption, but just to give the search engines junk fodder to help them “build” their site. These guys are supposedly search engine marketers, too. Shameless.

Well, I’ll be off contacting them to remove this information. Like I said, it’s not the first time I’ve had to do this with this particular company. Let’s see if we can make it the last.

The partners have pledged to develop a specification combining their respective cryptographic-based security offerings: Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Internet Identified Mail from Cisco.

The new product will be called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and will be offered royalty-free to the industry.

The goal behind this technology is to be able to trace spam emails back to their origin so they can be shut down.

“The spam problems is so large that no one company can solve it, so it’s good to see major companies like Yahoo and Cisco combine their strengths and make the technology widely available,” said Yankee Group senior analyst Andrew Jaquith.

He pointed out that among businesses, spam comprises anywhere from 30 percent to 90 percent of e-mail.

The new technology will be open and royalty free in the hopes that the new system will be used widely enough to effectively shut down email spammers completely.