The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics

jfruh writes "Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed a rash of often high-quality infographics by third parties appearing on your favorite websites. These images are offered to Web publishers free of charge, with the only request being a link back to the creator's own site. But when one blogger got an odd email from a the creator of infographic he put on his site two years ago, he did some digging and discovered that he had inadvertently helped some shady characters do SEO spamming."

Comments

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Slashdot and its Slashvertisements?

Misleading title on original article

[Dynedain]

Ummm I read the article, and other than the author being pretty obtuse, I don't see any substantial connection with infographics.

The author operates a blog, and was contacted by someone trying to operate a suspicious link-trading scheme. He engaged them to find out info the SEO scheme was directing traffic to a lead-generation system for online degrees.

End of story.

Anyone who operates a website has gotten spam about link trading schemes like this one. Nothing in here is specifically targeted to infographics.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like the source of that infographic was the bogus info-farming online school site, and they wanted the links updated.

It also sounds like they produce hundreds of these infographics and expects to be backlinked. I'm not sure that qualifies as a scam, but it's in a grey area for SEO.

Yes, it's their content. Yes, it's fair to request attribution from blogs reposting your info. But using that popular content to boost the search engine rank of your unrelated infofarm? Kinda lame.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[inamorty]

I think it would have helped more if you had explained yourself with the help of a diagram.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Zemran]

...but by writing this article for /. he has got far more clicks and his SEO has gone through the roof - win!!!

Re:Misleading title on original article

[NevarMore]

I've got a great diagram made up just to show this. You have to link back to me though....

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Zadaz]

Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.

Getting a site destroyed by /. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand, do you have a car analogy?

Re:Misleading title on original article

[VortexCortex]

It sounds like the source of that infographic was the bogus info-farming online school site, and they wanted the links updated.

It also sounds like they produce hundreds of these infographics and expects to be backlinked.

I think it would have helped more if you had explained yourself with the help of a diagram.

I don't understand, do you have a car analogy?

It's as if your car is acting up, and you search out a solution for your problem. A friend says, "Oh, that sounds like something easy to fix yourself. Here's a simple diagram + instructions. If you have any questions just swing by this close-by shop address, but if it helps you then spread the word."

Try as you might your problem persists, and so you visit the address your friend gave you with the instructions. When you arrive all you find is a School for Mechanics and several recruiters immediately begin pressuring you to act now and enroll for A+ certification. You'd drive away but they've plastered your windshield with half attached bumperstickers so that they flap in the wind, exploiting the fact that human attention is drawn towards movement.

You then wonder how many folks the DIY pictorial had managed to help, and how many times those who were luckier than you had given out that bogus address.

So, in an attempt to raise awareness of the questionable practice which you fell victim to, you write up a letter about the whole ordeal and publish it via newsletter. To help with the costs of producing the newsletter you place a few ads betwixt yon paragraphs. As luck would have it an editor of the local gear-head talk radio show discovers your newsletter on a slow news day and mentions it on air.

Suddenly your little newsletter is in more demand than you can meet, and you literally have to turn away some folks sans article. Some enraged would-be reader slices your car's tires for causing them the fruitless journey, thus the act of running out of in-demand newsletters becomes known as the "Slash-Tire Effect".

As you reflect upon the crazy whirlwind of happenings, you realize that you've become just as bad as the infographic con perpetrators you so despised: Your newsletter's advertising revenue more than made up for the amount to pay for your trivial problem to be fixed, but it simultaneously spread generic FUD about following your friends' mechanic advice, especially if accompanied by a photocopy of pages from a Haynes manual.

Eventually you receive a few letters from your newsletter readers which your publisher automatically publishes in the new editions. One reader jokingly claims that the whole story would have been easier understood if accompanied by an illustrated mechanical tear-down of the process. As an inside joke, another reader suggests that the ordeal would better be understood by them were it conveyed via computer science analogy. A third reader, being both a mechanic and computer scientist, replies with an overly detailed computing technology related analogy.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Omestes]

Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion...

Nope.

so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party.

What rage, didn't notice any.

Good luck with that.

Thanks.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[ocdscouter]

Suddenly your little newsletter is in more demand than you can meet, and you literally have to turn away some folks sans article. Some enraged would-be reader slices your car's tires for causing them the fruitless journey, thus the act of running out of in-demand newsletters becomes known as the "Slash-Tire Effect".

You are my hero forever.

Also, +1 Recursive Humor

Re:Misleading title on original article

[David Gerard]

A Slashdotting used to be hundreds of thousands of hits. My last Slashdotting got a total of 6000. Hacker News was more of a practical problem (that led to me installing WP SuperCache, which is fantastic, particularly in mod_rewrite mode).

The "Slashdot effect" is largely dead on Slashdot.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[geegel]

Actually you got it wrong. The author was not contacted by someone "trying" to operate a link-trading scheme, but rather by someone with whom the author already engaged with (he admittedly used some infographics from that site).

This is basically someone revolted that somebody else is making money on the internet.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, sounds like a good business to me. As long as the facts check out that means they're trading knowledge for SEO. For a business centered around schools and learning it seems like a novel way to use what you are already good at to further your business.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[nitehawk214]

6-digit UID is the new 5-digit UID

Let the lawn-get-offing commence.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

A Slashdotting used to be hundreds of thousands of hits. My last Slashdotting got a total of 6000. Hacker News was more of a practical problem (that led to me installing WP SuperCache, which is fantastic, particularly in mod_rewrite mode).

The "Slashdot effect" is largely dead on Slashdot.

One cannot be slashdotted if nobody clicks TFA.

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA said, the author made his own infographic.

I don't understand what the problem is.

[jibjibjib]

A site is increasing their search engine ranking by... producing meaningful content that people want to link to? I don't see what the problem is here.

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[Anonymous Coward]

.. producing meaningful content that people want to link to? I don't see what the problem is here.

referring to infographics as meaningful content is the problem

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Content farms are rarely meaningful content. Many infographics are only marginally accurate at best.

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[qwidjib0]

Agreed. If an infographic doesn't provide value, it doesn't do much. This post, on the other hand, got published to one of the biggest tech sites on the Internet, all because they regurgitated a sensationalist post about something that has been a core piece of online public relations and SEO for at least 5 years. There's no information there.

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[game kid]

Concur. If you absolutely must make one of those marketing-porn pics the sole content of your next tumblr post, at least put some damn alt and maybe longdesc* attributes with meaningful info.

Those of us who still can see get stuck with elinks sometimes, after all.

*Thank you, HTML5, for giving me yet another reason to loathe you.

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[J Story]

Agreed. This is a non-story. Is it time, now, to talk about the decline of Slashdot?

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[plover]

Yeah, I didn't exactly see their site or practices as shady. It's not like they're hiding what they're doing or who they're advertising for, so they're not spam. Getting people to link to you by offering content that apparently has enough value for you to link to them is not link farming, it's linking.

It's link farming if the links go back to a fake news aggregator site that nobody could really use. It's SEO comment spam if it includes gratuitous links in generic comments or pseudonymous profiles. (A small dose of nofollow will take care of those guys.)

This company is simply an advertiser that appears to be working hard on behalf of their clients, nothing more. They have provided something that you obviously once thought had value. Turn down the paranoia filter a notch or two, and maybe get away from the keyboard for a while. Perhaps rent a nice relaxing movie, like "Enemy of the State".

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

From Google's perspective, soliciting, exchanging, or generally acquiring links for the purposes of gaming their search algorithms is to be discouraged.

Re:I don't understand what the problem is.

[plover]

Your argument is that because they created the content primarily to get links is that it somehow makes the content less "worthy", whereas I think the content should be judged on its own merits.

Even if the content creator is an advertiser specializing in online-for-profit schools, that doesn't invalidate the content. This is actually more like ordinary advertising, except it's paid for with (somewhat) valuable content instead of directly with cash. And of course there is a link as a result, but it's a legitimate link back to their service.

I still don't see this as anything particularly shady or system-gaming.

valuable content

[Anonymous Coward]

Infographics get syndicated when they provide a useful visualization of something of something meaningful, where one did not exist before. That's valuable media.

Creating a sensationalist Slashdot submission that "unearths" what has been a core piece of public relations / SEO on the web for years, on the other hand, is spam.

The fact that this post got approved strikes me as much more lame.

Re:valuable content

[Geoffrey.landis]

Infographics get syndicated when they provide a useful visualization of something of something meaningful, where one did not exist before.

Or when they feature cute kittens. One or the other.

Re:valuable content

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

IME, they're linked to primarily by bloggers that openly love infographics and sometimes as a modern form of clipart. I follow quite a few blogs of various kinds, and the periodic infographics I see are usually posted on their own more as a factoid-of-the-day because they look cool, and virtually never convey information better than a sentence or two could.

High-quality infographics?

[Hentes]

I haven't seen one that had any value, they are just a way of using shiny pics to spread ignorance while appearing smart because they have numbers on 'em.

Re:High-quality infographics?

[actiondan]

Granted, most of the ones that pop up on blogs are pretty lame but there are some good ones out there.

Some of the ones produced for the Guardian newspaper are pretty good.

For example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/26/government-spending-department-2010-11

I also like the one's that Randall Munroe produces at xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/980/

The thing that the good infographics have in common is that the graphic part of them is integral to how they present the information - they are not just showing bits text with associated clip art.

Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Cheech Wizard]

The whole internet is changing (for the worse in my opinion). Even Google - Once an excellent Search Engine, now not so much. Even places like Webmasterworld aren't what they used to be. Facebook idiots and corporations are taking over. Get used to it. As to politics, yeah - The "interwebs" have changed that, too. Remember it wasn't so many years ago home computers were not particularly common so discussions on boards like /. were more "professional" (for lack of a better word off hand). These days every idiot has at least one computer. I run forums and these days even a lot of old timers who stayed around and monitored, and participated in, the forums are spending much of their time on Facebook or LinkedIn or Google+ rather than hanging around the forums. Slashdot is still one of my "daily check-in" sites. Admittedly these days I usually just scan the headlines, but now and again I drop into a thread (like this one) and read it or some of it. As to commenting in threads, I'm not typically into it posting and never have been even though I keep some forums online. --> My 2 cents

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and: you damn kids, get off my lawn.

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Omestes]

Get used to it.

I have. But I still can pine for the "glory days", I suppose. Where is the joy in getting old if I can't complain about everything going down hill? Seriously, things were better in the days of BBSs. I don't know if I've just aged, and my interests are different now, and I allocate my time differently, or if things have actually degraded. Well, I'm pretty sure /. has, but rather things as a whole.

As for the politics things... I'm not sure if the internet changed them, or if what is going on can actually be called politics anymore. Politics generally involved some form of discussion, or actual view point. It seems to be more defined by the negation of a view these days (Your not me, and thus don't hold my exact views; therefore you are an unthinking, evil, enemy type. Why do you hate freedom?). It has, though, completely killed this site for me. I want to read about stupid science and tech stories, if I wanted pseudo-political handwaving I'd be at Salon.com.

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Cheech Wizard]

You have aged (as we all are). I ran a BBS on phone lines in the 1980's up until 1990 when my work over took my hobby. It was fun. It was somewhat personal. It was a great hobby!

You have to accept a certain amount of "change". I pine for the "good old days" when I was in my 20's and 30's and had a dick as hard as a rock (and the gals always "approved" of the size {length *and* width}). In fact, my current GF of almost 8 years now is a gal whose husband died. She and I screwed around so many years ago. When her husband died she got in touch with me and I was unattached and she fucked me the first night she "stopped over to say hi". A couple years later she admitted she liked fucking me so much years ago that if only to "satisfy her desires" she made sure I fucked her that night. We've been "fuck buddies" for almost 8 years now. She stays here from Friday evening to Sunday morning every week, and she still comments on how "big" I am. I know she's lying (it was back then, but it isn't these days - And I refuse to take "boner" pills). But those days are long gone. I'm 62, over weight, and understand I can't pick up late teens and early 20's gals in bars any more, if only because I'm not "rich" which significantly changes things... Life is a bitch. The internet is no different, except it's happening faster and faster every year.

As to politics - Yeah. It has always been bad but these days - Well, I just keep out of expressing political views for the most part. I'm getting too old to care.

As to Salon, I gave it up years ago although I generally stop by every month or so as is the case with many web sites I used to visit regularly (You should see my bookmarks - Many go back to the mid and late 1990's). I look at politics this way - There days it's theatrics and greed to the max. It always has been to some extent, but the internet has definitely changed things for the worse *and* for the better, just as cell phones with video and cameras have. . I'm old enough to know one can not win political or religious discussions so I stay out of them. On the other hand, I don't give a rats ass if I do post something and I'm ripped up. That's the way open public forums are.

Now if you want to want to read about science and tech stories, the internet is one hell of a lot bigger than it was even 5 years ago. Search and ye shall find. From Scientific American to PBS - From the TED talks to Ars. There is so much online these days that it's hard not to be able to find sites that fit your expectations.

I don't mind what I see as the eventual demise of /. - And I can say the same about some other sites. It's simply move on. No one can stop what is essentially the evolution of the internet. Just as the Gutenberg press totally fucked the dark ages, and how Faux news changed real, unbiased new programs (Cronkite, Murrow, et al) to "Infotainment", the internet is an information distribution system which has changed the world so dramatically that many things will never be the same.

As a last thought - Now and again there are some excellent discussions here on /. Yes, it's harder to weed out the crap from the good stuff, but it's there. You just have to work harder to weed out the crap. Allowing anonymous posts doesn't help things. If I owned /. the first thing I would do would be to eliminate anonymous posts. If a person can't "own up" to what they post they shouldn't be allowed to post.

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[David Gerard]

It's not just the world that changes, it's you. A group is its own worst enemy.

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[RandomFactor]

The whole internet is changing (for the worse in my opinion). Even Google - Once an excellent Search Engine, now not so much.

Possibly the most widespread annoying SEO result in the wild is the proliferation of hundreds of different 'directory', 'locator' and 'local guide' type services that are just shady parasites on your search for whatever place you are actually looking for.

I understand they optimize these sites every way imaginable to increase their rank, but damn big G, this has been going on for years and for the life of me I can't figure out why Google, which is supposed to try to connect people with what they actually want, isn't downgrading these results in the search order so that we actually get the results we want. Oft times these fill up the entire first page and the actual legitimate match to what you are looking for is a page back or more.

I mean really, does ANYONE use these things or are they just something you nowadays have to wade through to get to the object of your search.

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[RandomFactor]

Get used to it.

I have. But I still can pine for the "glory days", I suppose. Where is the joy in getting old if I can't complain about everything going down hill? Seriously, things were better in the days of BBSs. .

Yeah, back in those days if you liked a comment you moderated it +++1

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Zemran]

Nostalgia is not what it used be...

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[nitehawk214]

Was the second paragraph of your post copypasta or TMI? And what the fuck did it have to do with anything? I like a good non-sequitor as much as the next person, but wtf?

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[fredrated]

"The Good Old Days" were when you ran a program by dropping off a box of punch cards at the computer center, glanced up at the posted turn-around time, looked at your last print out to see how many minutes of CPU time you had left in your account, then left for lunch before you came back to get your output, which hopefully wasn't just a core-dump you had to inspect to find where the divide-by-zero error occured.

Since then it has been just too easy for the masses to get involved and spoil everything!

Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[ekgringo]

TMI;DNR

Unfair

[fermion]

So this is really unfair. It is not like the site is tricking anyone into filling out form, or injecting javascript, or putting other content into frames, or charging you. Back in the day you would have charged over a hundred for this service. Many people were duped into thinking this was valuable.

In this case the site exists to connect people who are looking to go to college with colleges who want the money. This is no different than your average bank who will not only sell your name to a fraudsters, but allow them to put the bank logo on correspondence and then claim they have nothing to do with the offer.

In fact it is not the site who are like the banks, but the schools. They are the ones soliciting for others to attract clients using whatever mean necessary. The school have a choice of who they pay for fulfillment. They could simply say if anyone complains about fraud, they will not pay for fulfillment. Yet the don't. They knowingly engage in supporting whatever fraud may exist.

Which is not surprising. School like Phoenix exists to con young people into applying to student loans, taking that money.and giving much less than what would expect from a minimum education. National average default rate is around 14%, University of Phoenix has twice that. The cost of an associates degree is at least 25K, while most community colleges are half that.

If there is a story here it is that some schools have engaged in fraud, promoted fraud, solicited fraud, and destroyed young peoples lives all to steal a few dollars from the US taxpayers.

Link sharing is a scam?!?!? NO WAY?!

[BitZtream]

Seriously? Who didn't know this? Stupid question, my boss is one of those people that doesn't get it, but he's old and doesn't understand the Internet. Why anyone who can find slashdot on their own wouldn't get it is beyond me.

Re:Link sharing is a scam?!?!? NO WAY?!

[theskipper]

Well then, guess that makes you a pretty special snowflake.

Huh?

[BradleyUffner]

Let me make sure I understand your complaint... You went to a website that helps you apply for, and get in to schools. After you filled out applications for those schools you got upset when they called you to discuss the information you sent in your application? I don't understand where the problem is, am I missing something?

Infographics are rubbish anyway

[David Gerard]

Mostly it's PR companies.

Tom Morris outlines the problem: Infographics are porn without the happy ending.

Re:Infographics are rubbish anyway

[DarkEthereal]

... and that article also contains a link to onlineschools.org

What a lame ass article

[Anonymous Coward]

So this idiot is upset that the company was helping him not be seen by google as a link swap which it wasn't.

No problem there.

And he is upset that HE filled out a bunch of forms for schools and then submitted them and horror of horrors, they spent their time and money contacting him back.

Oh my god. Good customer service. And this idiot complained.

Then the idiot complains about guest posts. Hello, he's posting on IT World and IT World is giving him links back to his own site so both of their fan bases grow. He was doing the same fucking thing. He's harvesting traffic.

This article is just there as link bait for privacy zealots. There's not an issue with this at all.

Stupid waste of time sensationalism. Grrrr

Re:What a lame ass article

[geegel]

Good point. And btw, why the heck is this article tagged with "spam"?

subject

[Legion303]

You say someone gave you a free product, and then you found out that YOU were the real product? Shocking!

Article fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure I really see his point here. He filled out application forms for online schools, and then started getting calls from those schools, which probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Spam, it is not - spam is unsolicited.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, he deep-links to someone else's content and then got an email from them asking him to change the keywords associated with the link? How awful. But perhaps "owners of infographics have an interest in how they're used" is less of a headline. The website may be shonky and the privacy policy laughable, but that doesn't make his point.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

You filled out an application. What did you expect would happen? This is the exact opposite of spam, YOU indicated you were interested. They contacted you to follow up on that interest. Frankly, I half think the author should have to pay for the sales people's time he wasted.

IF YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED IN A DEGREE, DON'T FILL OUT A APPLICATION TO A UNIVERSITY.