Craigslist Spam
I came across three different posts today talking about spam on Craigslist. What I found most interesting about all the stories is the fact that no one seemed to get the SEO connection.
The increase in affiliate related spam everyone’s seeing is due in large part to Google’s infatuation with the Craigslist domain. Google routinely puts Craigslist pages on the first page for search terms that return between 1-2 million results. And if you throw a little link love at a Craigslist post, you can get it to pop for phrases even more competitive.
If you still don’t think its being done for SEO value, ask yourself why someone would waste their time posting affiliate products on the small market CL sites like Albany, Asheville, or Allentown? Those sites don’t come close to having enough human traffic to make it worth the effort. But what they do have is a post life of 45 days, instead of the 7 day limit found in the major markets. That means the post has a smaller chance of getting flagged, and it can last long enough to get indexed and listed in Google. Since Google doesn’t discriminate based on the size of the city, it becomes the best place to post.
Stupid Things We Say – Part 2
Last St. Patrick’s Day, I had a couple of cocktails and wrote a post called “Stupid Things We Say.” That post contained some examples of really stupid press releases that were distributed through PR Web by companies in the SEO space. At the time I wrote it, I was just trying to kill some time with a little light-hearted humor. Although the irritation these press releases caused was real, they didn’t really have a negative impact on my daily routine because I don’t rely on press release distribution sites as a source for “industry news.”
Jimmy Wales - Google Killer
Posted by Greg on December 24th, 2006Can Jimmy Wales Really Kill Google?
I doubt it. But it’s been fun reading some of the ridiculous posts that are all over the web right now. The first one I came across this morning was a post by Isabel Wang titled:
Wikipedia Founder Launches Human Powered Search Engine; Goodbye to SEO?
Jimmy is going to kill Google and SEO? Now that’s a post I needed to read.
Unfortunately, Isabel must have forgotten to post the part about SEO. Not a single mention of it.
Then I moved on to TechCrunch. They got me to click and read because they had an “exclusive screen shot” of Jimmy’s Google killing app. Now that is something I needed to see. But it turns out that all they really had was a picture of a mediocre “MSN Quality” SERP with some Adwords ads and a few wiki tags thrown in at the top.
Are you kidding me? That SERP is what’s going to kill Google?
Then I surfed on over to Jimmy’s site. He’s got a message posted on the homepage telling everyone that TechCrunch is full of crap. That screen shot has nothing to do with his top secret Google killer. (Of course, he doesn’t provide any information about the real project. In order to get that, you need to subscribe to his mailing list).
I certainly hope he’s telling the truth. I know if I was Amazon and I’d just invested a bunch of cash, I’d be pretty pissed to find out the “great idea” was to use Nutch to crawl all the external links in the Wiki….
Blog Tagging
Posted by BB on December 24th, 2006I really enjoyed reading all the recent blog taggings. I was waiting for someone to add…”if you don’t forward this to 5 friends right away you will lose all Google positions for 5 years”.
I wasn’t tagged, but I figure I’ll throw in 5 things people might not know about my SEOH. Things that he of course didn’t share when he was tagged.1) He has lit himself on fire at least once…by accident of course.
2) He used to work construction.
3) His first car was a VW Baja Bug.
4) He once sat in Madonna’s kitchen (with Madonna) drinking water out of a 7-11 plastic cup.
5) Elton John once played “Candle in the Wind” for him in private.Now of course, you’d have to know who my SEOH is in order for any of this to mean anything, but some of you will figure it out.
Frog Talk Part 2 - Gord Speaks on Behalf of Searchers
Posted by Greg on December 21st, 2006While we’re busy arguing organic vs. ppc from a marketer’s point of view, Gord was putting together a great post about actual search user behavior. Definitely worth a read.
Look, David Pasternak can ring the funeral bell for organic all he wants, but the fact is, it’s not his call. It’s the user’s. Yahoo has actually done exactly what he and Kevin are predicting. They’ve moved organic down the page, jamming more sponsored on the top. Based on Did It’s comments, this should be good for the user, right? It should be more relevant, pushing the "spam" down below the fold. Wrong. Google kicked Yahoo’s ass in user experience in our latest study by every metric we looked at. And they’re definitely winning in the big picture, including stock prices. The difference. About 14% of Yahoo’s screen real estate (at 1024 by 768 pixels) was reserved for top organic. 33% of Google’s real estate went for top organic.
My only real complaint with Gord’s post is the fact that he’s missing an R in Guerrilla.
