Alright, this will hit home to some of my readers, but fuck it, I won’t stand for that shit. I work at a company that has as a main objective SEO, or in layman’s terms, optimizing search results for a specific site or URL. I respect what they do as a company and as individuals, it’s not my field and, even if I’ve judged it in the past, I made peace with it. While I do not approve some of the techniques which border blackhatness or ethical questionning, there’s a market, there’s a demand, and they provide the means to an end, which is perfectly fine. I’ve never done it for any of my sites, some of which had a million hits per month without SEO or advertising. I subscribe to the school of people who think that if you want good position in search engines, have a better product or a better content than the other guy — but that’s my personal take on it, and it’s in no way profitable for anyone. All that to say that I understand the concept, I don’t approve some of it, but I live with it and manage to respect people who do that for a living.
With that being said, one thing I won’t fucking tolerate is people who I call friends commenting on my blog using SEO techniques. Fuck you. That’s fucking insulting. This is my private blog, one that if you don’t have anything to say, I want you to shut the fuck up. Don’t pull that shit on me – I will ban your ass and not give one look back.
I’m not gonna make this a rant about SEO, the state of the web today, marketing or the company I work for. What had to be said has been said, and if you can’t respect it, get the fuck out right this second.
Thank you.
Edit: wanted to add that after talking it over with the person in question, I hold no grudge and feel no animosity towards him.
September 9th, 2008 at 11:57 am
but this is a fight you can’t possibly win. you’re sure to get spam from robots and from other tools used by blackhats SEOs. just use something like defensio and mark as spam comments you don’t like
September 9th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
@heri That’s not what I’m referring to. Akismet, Defensio can’t block people from posting whatever author name they want, it seems legit to any third party entity. But Google will associate the author name with his website. The comment my friend posted was legit, and although useless and with no sense, it was fine. The SEO technique he used was simply using keywords in his comment author and link his website, for example, instead of using “Pier-Luc” as author name and linking to my blog, I would use “PHP Programmer in Montreal”. See the difference? It wasn’t automated, it wasn’t keyword-spamming, it was apparently a legitimate post.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Nice recap of the technique pluc, sure will help other bloggers to identify it and block it as it goes more and more.
One way to automatically fight this is to use the attribute for links rel=”nofollow” wich is already in place on WP, I think on WP > 2.3. If not just put this attribute next to the post author url. From the W3C :
September 28th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Nice article and comments!