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

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

[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.

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.

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.

Infographics are rubbish anyway

[David Gerard]

Mostly it's PR companies.

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