How Not To Be a SEO Spammer

An anonymous reader writes "The head of Google's webspam team, Matt Cutts, has blogged about one of his colleagues receiving an email offering SEO services to help the web site www.google.com. The irony wasn't lost on Matt, who has blogged about these emails before. As this article points out, if ever there was evidence that the people who send many of these emails haven't done their homework, this is it."

Comments

This page should have more comments

[spoot]

It would make it rank higher organically with search engines.

Re:This page should have more comments

[cold fjord]

I will send you my bill for this comment.

Re:This page should have more comments

[ackthpt]

It would make it rank higher organically with search engines.

Well, here's one....

I had to go look up 'SEO' as I was drawing a blank on it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There, now I have some idea what the article is about.

Maybe someone could optimize editors on /. to make sure all acronyms are spelled out at least once in the article.

Re:This page should have more comments

[Joce640k]

The real LOL is that the department heads think spammers/scammers "do homework".

Re:This page should have more comments

[drinkypoo]

Because everyone on /. is a web marketer, developer, or designer?

Because the term is used everywhere, all the time.

Re:This page should have more comments

[egcagrac0]

SEO is a business term, not a technical term. It's more relevant if you're in marketing than in devops.

Re:This page should have more comments

[drinkypoo]

Well, dang, there's a first class assumption and exaggeration right there, no wonder we can't get good editors around this joint: Low expectations!

Both editors and users have responsibilities. I am well-known to have long railed against slashdot's "editors", often putting the word in quotes as to the left so as to drive my point home — no doubt childishly in the eyes of some. Which is ironic, because the "editors" do their work with crayon. But as a user of a site about technology news, you are responsible for familiarity with common acronyms which relate to technology. The internet may be mankind's greatest achievement, and we discuss internet technologies often here on Slashdot. The web is an internet technology. Search is a critical part of the web, and has been for many years. Optimizing websites for search engine indexing has been done about as long as automated spiders have been constructing their databases. And SEO has long been a well-recognized acronym for this process. It is trivial to find out what SEO means by using Google, or probably even Bing. In short, a reader of slashdot has no excuse for needing to be told by Slashdot what SEO is. They are not only disconnected and thus ignorant, but also lazy.

trust me

[Anonymous Coward]

SEO is like Voodoo in some sense. It's not measurable because there's too many factors outside your control.
Is there traffic because the SEO is awesome, or is there traffic anyways. No one knows.

The only thing an SEO can say for sure is that we can make the proper on-site changes. Without ever
mentioning the word traffic - because that leads to false hopes.

Re:trust me

[pspahn]

Yes, it's mostly snake oil, but there is something to be said for properly implemented schema.org tags, well formed page names, and the rest of the stuff that makes your site not only bubble higher in the search results, but also provide useful links within your search results.

And by the way, you can indeed quantify SEO improvements. The only problem is that the SEO guy usually doesn't know how and ends up asking a developer anyway.

Re:trust me

[Intrepid imaginaut]

How is it not measurable, you either go up or down in relevant search results. Anyway amusing as this story is, I have a hunch that almost all of the SEO spam has nothing to do with SEO, but is rther people trying to social engineer access to servers for viral distribution purposes.

I guess they saw Google.com's bing rating?

[mysidia]

It is true, that searching for other search engines is a favorite way your average end user utilizes to access other search engines. So Google's SEO / ranking across other search engines is pretty important.

(Obviously; this is essential to their core business, and they won't leave this to an outside contracter )

News for nerds, stuff that matters

[Swampash]

Next up: Slashdot reveals that some of those billionaire Nigerian princes aren't actually real!

Well, there is some logic to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you search for "web search" on Google, you get some "websearch.com" as top result, then wiki entry on web search, then Yahoo and lots of other shitty/scammy looking pages like mywebsearch, Google is nowhere in sight.

Searching for "search" gives, in order, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter's search, search.com, Dogpile, Wikipedia and even AOL. Google's search is on second page.

Damn right they can't SEO for shit!

PS: Searching for "search" on Bing gives Google as top detailed result with links to subsites.

Re:Well, there is some logic to it.

[AbsGeekNZ]

searching for "search" on nz.bing.com gives Google as the 5th result....bing no where to be seen!

Re:Well, there is some logic to it.

[wvmarle]

Then they give good results. If I use a search engine to search for search engines, I'm not interested in the search engine I'm searching with to show in the search results, as I found that one already. So that's six searches in one sentence :-)

Props, though.

[bill_mcgonigle]

The spammer managed to get ahold of a real human inside Google. No small feat.

Re:Props, though.

[Samantha Wright]

The machine learning researcher in me feels this comment is overly presumptuous and possibly discriminatory.

This is a non-story

[antifoidulus]

Um, isn't the very definition of a spammer someone who doesn't do their homework, i.e. spams mails out to as many addresses as they can find? I somehow doubt that mail was typed into a mail client and sent specifically to Google. Some spambot harvested a bunch of info and then sent emails to everyone it could find. In other news, water is wet.
I *suppose* you could add a filter to the spambot, but really why? There are only a handful of search engines, and I'm sure the admins have really good spam filters, so you don't gain a whole lot by excluding them.

so i got an SEO phone call....

[acedotcom]

she wanted to boast my rank on google. i asked her how she found my business number and then pointed out that someone had to google it....which means my SEO is just fine. she then hung up.

Re:so i got an SEO phone call....

[Anonymous Coward]

I told them that when I needed SEO I would search for it and whichever company ranked highest would get the call.

well this is coincidence

[bitt3n]

so google gets an offer for SEO, and shortly thereafter google just happens to appear on slashdot?

I guess they opted for the budget package.