ELWsoftware.com

Yes, if you are interested in SEO and want to leave a comment, please do so!  ELW software is willing to personally read any comment you leave as long as it is about SEO.  If you want to try and trick us with automated comment spam software, be our guest.  We at ELW are confident that we can detect any junk comments you try to get past us.

If you have read this far, and are human, you probably realize that ELW posted this article as a honeypot to test our spam detection software.  If you really are interested in leaving a comment about SEO, please do.  I don’t expect you will see any spam get through here.

The great website idea of the day is to create a site to seek revenge on spammers.  Everybody I know would gladly visit a well-built website that makes spammers look bad.  I think it would even be very profitable.  People would pay to publicly shame some of these bums.  If you are interested in making this site a reality, contact ELW and see just how easy it can be to own and manage a website for money.

Think of all the possibilities for this idea:

1. Publicly shame the worst spammers in the world.
2. Become the source for the funniest and stupidest spam messages.
3. Use investigative techniques to track down the spammers and call them.  Post the conversation on youtube and other sites.  Do it with some enthusiasm
4. Get their websites blacklisted from Google.

This site would be perfect for the charismatic, emotional type of person; somebody who might actually want media attention.

At the ELW Software blog we get tons of spam comments.  Many of them are easy to detect as being spam.  Some of them are complete nonsense, with links to domains that are also complete nonsense.  The idea behind these posts is that spammers are trying to get links to their own pages because they believe that this will increase the visitors to their pages.  This was a good idea 10 years ago, but now it is stupid.  Stupid unless you occasionally want to click on links to random web pages with names like t5hf73jd8f.com in blog comments.  I’m sure it works a little bit, and if you are interested in this idea check out my articles about web design for zombies.

Here is a simple way to tell if the short comments on a WordPress blog are spam:

• If you can’t understand the comment, it’s spam.
• If the comment is for some kind of prescription drug, it’s spam unless that’s what your blog is about.
• If the comment isn’t related to the post, but vaguely sounds human, you need to do some extra checking.  On our blog at ELW we generally dispose of comments that don’t add anything useful to the conversation.  We delete stuff like “great post! keep up the good writing” because it is also spam usually.  Even if it isn’t spam we usually delete it anyway in case the commenter is just probing to find suckers.  They post an innocent comment, and if you leave it they put you on a list of people that approve useless comments.  Then you will get even more spam.
• You can use Google to see if a comment is spam.  Use your mouse to select the first sentence or two of the comment, then copy and paste the comment in the search box to find out how many times the comment has been posted in other places.  99.99% of the time spammers use the exact same comment on thousands or even millions of blogs.

It is truly a good feeling to know that somebody is reading what you write in your blog.  Many spammers try to take advantage of this when they carefully craft their human-looking comments.  If having positive, complimenting, and encouraging spam comments on your blog makes you feel good inside, go ahead and leave them there.  I would think differently about the whole situation if the spammers “paid a toll” while they were there.  Anyone with adsense on their blog should know what I am talking about.   Until spammers get the idea, their crap will get the boot!  Seriously, if spammers started clicking adsense ads I would probably still be against the idea.  I don’t want Google to make any more money off spammers than they already do.

Page or pagerank sculpting is defined by controlling how you want certain pages in your site to be higher ranked in search results than others.  Obviously you don’t want administrative pages showing up in search results.

One example would be sites with tracking software that shows you who visited to your site.  Some of these software packages put a link to whatever site referred visitors to your site.  Presumably this is so you can more easily click the link and see where they came from.  The trouble with this approach is that anybody with a tiny bit of programming skill can beat the system.  They can write a program that visits a bunch of sites automatically, saying that the visitor was referred by a link on any page they want.  This means that they can run the software overnight, and in the morning the tracking pages will have links to the fake referrer.  You should at least nofollow a link to any tracking page on your site that does this.  It is preferable that you don’t use tracking software that produces links at all.  Ask ELW about how to do some really serious tracking, and we would be glad to help.

As far as search engine optimization goes, pagerank sculpting using nofollow is a dead idea.  Matt Cutts at Google explained how thing have been different since at least 2008.  Here is the idea:

• If you had nofollowed some links so that other links would pass on more value, this no longer does so.
• The link value passed through followed links is the same regardless of whether other links on the page are nofollowed.
• Adding nofollow to links doesn’t save their link value to be passed on via followed links, it basically just throws it away.
• A decay is used on every page to prevent “loops” of pages from saving up any value passed in from an outside link.

Yes, this is not that shocking.  This policy prevents pagerank sculpting from doing anything useful.

This policy makes using rel=”nofollow” completely useless from an SEO standpoint!

Here is my opinion on the issue:

• Google is free to use whatever “mental-model” they want in their algorithm for any reason they wish.  I won’t join in with others in saying how the new system is wrong.  I personally like it.
• Nofollow is solely a way to cast a vote saying you don’t trust a link, but it is still a vote.
• If you don’t trust a link from your page, don’t use a link!
• WordPress by default will nofollow any links in comments to your blog.  I don’t consider this a solution to the problem.

Here are a few hints on how to take advantage of this new model:

1. Don’t allow any links in comments at all! It really is that simple.  It’s your blog, and you decide who’s graffiti should go there.  Blogs that are more busy might have trouble keeping up, but in my opinion it is worth your time to delete useless comments.  Even if you nofollow links in comments, they still deteriorate the value of real links from your blog entries.
2. Google can’t help it. Google currently requires links to differentiate itself from the other search engines.  No, wait, it isn’t 1998 anymore: Every decent search engine uses links!  I very sincerely suggest not changing your page sculpting techniques because of Google.  Nofollow might actually be working as it should on other search engines. (hint!, Google might secretly be trying to get you to make changes that only benefit Google!)  Don’t risk your search results positions on Yahoo and Bing just because Google thinks you should change your “mental model”.
3. Use the decay calculation to your advantage! Pages that take more clicks to reach through links means those pages are eventually passed less pagerank value.  So the obvious solution is to place links directly from your most often visited pages.
4. Links are meant to be clicked! Followed or nofollowed, a link is a link.  People will click on it if enough of them see it.  Don’t burn off too much mental energy worrying about links on pages that not too many people visit.  Pay extra attention to what you link to on your most visited pages.  Presumably you want visitors to read more of your articles, or at least go somewhere that benefits you.  If you don’t link to outside sites, it takes extra effort to leave.
5. Link location matters! A link at the top of the page is more likely to get clicked than a link in the footer.  Seriously consider how many people will click on a link that appears under pages of comments like “Great post! I agree with you”.  Here is a mental model for you to employ: If no human sees your link, no human will click your link.  If you optimize your pages for bots, your page will get traffic from bots.

After receiving this comment “Hey,mate.Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.thanks for sharing this.” in our blog post about top ten reasons Google sucks, I decided to search for the term.

It is automatically generated spam comment to get a link to their page.

I won’t repeat the site they linked to for a number of reasons:

1. I don’t care about their site, and don’t think it is worthy of a link from anyone, especially on an article about the stupidity of Google’s operations.
2. My search for your comment showed that you post the exact same comment on tons of different blogs.  Is it the default post in some dumbass spam software you bought?
3. Other times the links were to other sites, under other names, selling some other crap.
4. Sometimes I just get motivated to do my own evil, and now you need to watch out.

So, the plan is the following:

1. If you found this post as the result of searching for the text of a blog comment, congratulations!
2. Don’t click on any link associated with this junk.
3. Consider ELW for your anti-spam terror-campaign.  We have extraordinary tracking capability and we know everything about any spammer that visits a site.
4. Even though we wish Google would change, we know how to use them to cause trouble for spammers also.

You see, if you catch a cheater cheating at some game, it won’t make them stop cheating.  You need to make the cheating less beneficial.  When spamming is no longer effective, it will stop.

If you get a comment on your blog like “Hey,mate.Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.thanks for sharing this.”  Change the link to something else that won’t help the spammer.  I suggest changing the link to the URL for this post.