Web Spam 101: Do SEO Bloggers Dream Of Eclectic Forums?

I learned more about basic search engine optimization from spammers than I have ever learned from all the high-and-mighty “ethical” SEOs combined. Think of me what you will, but I know a great deal more about the Black Hat Arts than I have ever written about.

Here at work we’re required to build strictly ethical, so-called “white hat” SEO campaigns for clients. If only because there is no general agreement about what is acceptable or desirable, some of things we do may be considered “grey hat” by some people. Your mileage may vary.

But we don’t use doorway pages, we don’t use redirection, we don’t link spam forums and blogs and guest books, we don’t steal content — we don’t do all that controversial stuff that gets sites banned or penalized. Our clients would not be very happy with us if we knocked them out of the search indexes.

Nonetheless, being well schooled in the Black Hat Arts, I know spam when I see it. And every now and then some spam has my name on it. I am usually mildly surprised, somewhat amused, but considerably disturbed when this happens.

In 2005, for example, I found my RSS feeds were generating content for thousands of SpamAd sites (a particularly ugly type of MFA). “Not to worry,” Danny Sullivan assured me. “It’s all in your mind,” or something like that. You see, I saw the spam coming before the rest of the SEO community realized what was knocking its content out of the SERPs.

I complained often and loudly. Maybe Google heard me. Maybe they saw it at the same time and were already on to the problem. I don’t know the full story, don’t care about it, but by July or August 2005 those sites had vanished. The spam technique lasted about a year, maybe 18 months.

Last year someone started a forum that scrapes blog posts. My content was being used without authorization or credit. I sent cease-and-desist notices. I was ignored. I complained to Google. I outed the forum on my blog. The forum still exists but it no longer ranks in any keywords I care about.

Score: Google 2, Spammers 0.

Okay, the spammers are a diverse lot and they are constantly expermenting with new ideas (the SEO method was perfected by spammers, who constantly experiment, evaluate, adjust). So I was not really surprised to learn that since February 2007 I have been posting to a forum (in my own name) that I’ve never heard of before.

I’m not going to give them even a nofollow link but you can find the forum if you look for Internet Marketing Guide in the .AC top-level domain (the actual domain consists of “guide” and the “internet marketing” part is a sub-domain). Can you put all that together?

As of today I have apparently posted there 36 times. Now, there are a lot of guys named “Michael Martinez” running around the Internet. It’s entirely possible that someone sharing my name is also interested in Internet marketing.

But if that is the case, then why is he replicating my SEO Theory blog posts word-for-word from the old Blogspot domain?

That sort of makes me wonder who else is contributing to that forum without any knowledge of it. I cannot confirm whether they know they are contributors, but Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall, and Stuntdubl (Todd Mailcoat) also appear in the active members’ list. I guess I keep good company with the best of SEO insiders.

Sadly, Rand Fishkin does not appear among the members. Nor does SEOmoz. I feel like we’re missing a key part of the SEO blogging dream team here.

There are a lot of scraper forums out there. Simply filling a forum with scraped content is nothing new. But this whizkid spammer has decided to create sock puppets in real people’s names, using blog posts or other content those people have published elsewhere, to generate content for the sock puppets.

We do get footer links in our profiles. I guess that’s something. Alas! Since I moved SEO Theory off of Blogger, I seem to have stopped participating in the forum — and my footer link points to the old Blogger URL for SEO Theory.

I’m not getting any link love. That just bites.

So to conclude today’s lesson, my young apprentices, let me say this: if you’re going to engage in identity theft on the Internet, don’t get caught. Better yet, don’t do it.

If you’re going to do the stealth SEO thing, keep in mind that the key word is “stealth”. Putting Danny Sullivan, Michael Martinez, Aaron Wall, and Stuntdubl sock puppets all in the same forum is not stealthy. That’s just plain stupid.