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

[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

[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.

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.

[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".

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.

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'!

[Zemran]

Nostalgia is not what it used be...

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.