The Joy Of Watching Comment Spammers Scramble To Try To Delete Links After Google Demoted Them

from the it's-kind-of-fun dept

Wed, Dec 18th 2013 1:05pm — Mike Masnick

Starting a few months back, we started noticing a weird trend here at Techdirt. Every two or three days, we'd get an email from someone asking us, politely, to please remove a comment they had posted. Every single time, it was someone who had somehow gotten comment spam through our (pretty good) multi-layer comment spam filter (which catches more than 1,000 spam comments per day). Each one reads something like the following:

Hi,

We noticed that your site https://www.techdirt.com is linking to our site [redacted] on the url [Techdirt article URL]

Unfortunately [our company] has been hit by an Unnatural Link Penalty and we are now trying to get all links taken down where possible, rather than disavowing them.

If you could spare 5 minutes to take this link down we would be extremely grateful. Do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.

There are a number of variations on this. My favorite is the following, which ridiculously implies that that we were working with them and they "appreciate the support."

Hello Webmaster,

My name is Matthew Victor and I’m a SEO specialist with [redacted], first off I want to thank you for linking to our site from https://www.techdirt.com/, we appreciate the support over the years.

Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that this link may be viewed by Google as a violation of the Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

It is important for us to bring our website into compliance, so we are requesting that you remove our link from this page and any other page on your website.

To assist you in the process of removing these links from your site I’m including a list of the pages we have been able to identify as linking to us.

[URLs redacted]

We would greatly appreciate your prompt response to this request and removal of these links along with any others on your site.

Thanks,

One time, we got one that insisted that if we didn't remove the link, Google would punish us as well. Every time we get these (and it's been happening with increasing frequency), there's a bit of an internal dilemma. We don't delete comments unless they're spam. That's our general comment policy around here. But, these are clearly spam, and it's annoying they got through our spam filter. If we had discovered them on our own, we would have deleted them. But, just the fact that these jackass comment spammers are getting in trouble for them... makes us pause and think a bit. It feels somehow wrong to abide by the wishes of these comment spammers who littered our site.

It appears that we're not the only ones dealing with this. Apparently, Google's algorithmic changes over the past year or so have hit those who abused comment spamming quite hard, and plenty of blogs are getting these kinds of emails. The folks over at The Awl have a nice article about it, in which they quote Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza going through the same debate we did, and ending up with the same conclusion:

This isn't only happening in The Awl's inboxes, either. "The funny thing is, we don't actually want that spam lurking around in old comments," Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza wrote to me in an email. "But we obviously like seeing the spammers suffering as a result of their own misbehavior."

"So we just leave it up," he wrote, "even though we don't want it, in the hope that Google may penalize them further."

The Awl did some digging and found out that the changes to Google's algorithm have really hit those comment spammers hard, which is something worth cheering.

"The average drop was from page one to page five in Google," [the "SEO" guy trying to remove comments that The Awl contacted] said. In some cases they even dropped as low as page ten. How often do you find yourself on the fifth—much less the tenth—page of Google results? If you've gotten that far, you're better off just refining or revising your search terms.

"We needed to delete all of the bad links," he said. "It was a big list—a few thousand, even ten thousand links. We just moved one by one: this is a toxic link, we need to delete it; this is a good, natural link."

"We had links from the Daily Mail, Huffington Post, and we had links from profiles in shitty forums or small websites that we didn't want to get the link from," he said. Apparently by that he meant... us. So the goal clearly isn't to remove all spam links. Just the least-good ones.

The Awl notes that it, too, has received emails from those trying to remove comment spams saying that Google will punish them as well. However, the first time we got one of those, we reached out to people at Google who told us that we were fine. First of all, all of the links in our comments automatically have rel=nofollow appended to them, which means that Google already does not use them as authoritative (though, I do wonder if they use them to help demote certain links...), and knows that we've "disavowed" the links. Also, our general page rank and reputation likely protects us from having the algorithm think we've suddenly turned into link spammers.

As we mentioned just recently, whenever I've brought this up on Twitter, some people have suggested we should offer to charge for the removal of those spam comments -- and at times that's tempting. But, in the end, the companies that spewed that spam deserve whatever crap they get. If they didn't realize it was evil to post comment spam, then they're not the kinds of organizations worth doing business with in the first place.

Now, if only the message that comment spamming is dead could make its way to the folks who are still hitting us with 1,000 or so comment spams per day...

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: comment spammers, google algorithm, rankings

72 Comments

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out_of_the_blue, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:32pm

SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
Maybe this will convince you that other reasonable purposes for the common good are, er, reasonable to impose on mega-corporation Google, which as a condition of its mere existence, must serve The Public, and has billions offshore not yet taxed with which to implement these minor expenses of writing a bit of code.

SO. Turns out that Mike WILL come round to my views, heh, heh! Because my views are aligned with common law. By the way, that's why I don't bother "making nice": reality is on my side (that's a joke, kids, as if "reality" is on my side, reversed, see?) ... my view is that I'm aligned with reality to best of my belief, and it's amusing how you kids struggle against it, but best way is for you to be dragged kicking and screaming, it's the only way anyone ever learns.
Just as Mike criticizes and advises MPAA and RIAA only so they'll actually get more money, so too my efforts here show that I'm Mike's friend, trying to improve his product so attracts more readers.

09:29:39[k-842-3]
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- Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:37pm
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  Many times your reality is in the Twilight Zone. Also, if you bothered"making nice", you views would probably be seen in a better light and not just reported.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Deranged Poster (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 3:09pm
    
    Re: Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
    They're getting reported so fast they can't even be viewed when it's the newest story :D
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:45pm
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  Just want to say it always look for your comments man. Love em
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Rich, 18 Dec 2013 @ 6:34pm
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  Insane comment from usual moron. Click "report." Moving on...
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Zem, 18 Dec 2013 @ 6:39pm
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  Just as a general observation. OOTB, in the past I may have disagreed with you, but at least I could understand what you were writing. Now it's getting to the point where your writing is total gibberish.
  
  I woner what is happening to your google ranking?
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- out_of_the_blue, 18 Dec 2013 @ 7:04pm
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  "I'm aligned with reality to best of my belief"
  
  That says it all.
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  - vegetaman (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 8:35pm
    
    Re: Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
    "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
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    - Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 3:13am
      
      Re: Re: Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
      Careful now, that is what he did.
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- Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 12:24am
  
  Re: SO, Google policing that Mike approves of!
  I'm all for no internet police, but I'm cool with spam being policed because I fucking hate it.
  
  Glory to thee brother, I am Prince Wong Tang of the Nigerian Clan MacLeod. You have won our internet lotto prize of 42 million dollars. To collect there is a one time processing fee of 3700 dollar.
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limbodog (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:43pm

Please to edumicate me.
Ok, can anyone clue me in a bit on this subject? I get that people are spamming bulletin boards all the time, but how is Google choosing who to punish? What makes some spams worse or better than others?
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- John Fenderson (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:50pm
  
  Re: Please to edumicate me.
  Here's what Google says about it: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html
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  - Anonymous Howard (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 4:10am
    
    Re: Re: Please to edumicate me.
    Here's my idea how to eat the cake and keep it too:
    
    Move the spam comments to a quarantine "post", where they don't do harm to anyone's visual orifices, but are indexed by google, thus detected as spam and demoted in response.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:31pm
  
  Re: Please to edumicate me.
  Ok it's like this... Google's goal in ranking search results for websites is to try to give the user what they are most likely looking for. Part of determining that is how popular a website is where the more popular it is the more likely it is to be relevant to what the user is looking for with those keywords. So naturally it would stand to reason if there is a lot of discussion on other sites that link back to a particular site it most likely a more popular choice that a site that has no one talking about it (and linking back to it) elsewhere. So knowing this, these spammers are trying to artificially game the algorithm that determines page rank by littering unwanted links on popular sites in comments everywhere, but now that Google is on to that and when they detect what is going on they purposely demote the page that the links go to (having exactly the opposite effect of what the spammers were trying to achieve) they are scrambling to remove the spam that they littered everywhere in hopes that it will improve their page rank back to something that isn't worse than normal.
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indy, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:43pm

Backfire?
Couldn't this be abused by posting links to competitors' products in a spammy fashion?

Seems like this will quickly backfire...
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s0beit, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:43pm

Heh
I've gotten HUNDREDS of these same emails.

Here's my dilemma, though. I know that these are spammers, but there is a possibility that they are not personally spammers and had hired a dubious SEO company (which black hatted their way through rankings).

I do feel bad for those people, and I will occasionally delete a profile or two in response if the content was useless.

For the rest of them: Haha! I laugh nearly every time.
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- John Fenderson (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:52pm
  
  Re: Heh
  there is a possibility that they are not personally spammers and had hired a dubious SEO company
  
  In which case, they're still spammers even if unwittingly. Punishing them is still a Good Thing, since it should cause them to fire the bastards that they hired.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:40pm
    
    Re: Re: Heh
    They probably have already, once the spammer has been paid he's off...
    
    You'll be hurting ignorant owners or their poor staff who have to clear up their mess.
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    - Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 10:01pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: Heh
      Still their responsibility.
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      - Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 11:44pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        They've messed up (buy hiring the wrong guy) been hit with a penalty (which = lost sales) and are trying to fix it...
        
        I'm not sure why you feel the need to punish the other victim of the spammer.
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        PaulT (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 12:59am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        I see your argument, but a company does bear some responsibility for the people they hire. They'd still be on the hook if, say, they hired an ad agency that produced an offensive ad or if a manufacturer they outsourced to made substandard goods. I don't see why it should be different here.
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        Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 3:15am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        What happens to the people who have no control over their fans that are linkholics?
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        Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 3:53am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        They certainly bare some responsibility which is why making them do the legwork of clearing up the links is a great move on Google's part. I also think it's perfectly fair for webmasters to charge them a $5-10 fee to remove the links.
        
        Not many analogies fit to be honest since there are a wide range of people involved in this with differing levels of compliance and understanding.
        
        I know a local small businesses that has lost ranking because of an "expert" who convinced them he was white-hat and then proceeded to do comment spam. The owner has lost sales, lost the money he spent on his "expert" and lost man-hours trying to fix the problem. A "fuck em all it's their own fault" attitude is quite naive imo.
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        PaulT (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 4:19am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        So, a little due diligence on who is hired should be encouraged. I know that some people really don't have a clue about these things and so might inadvertently hire a conman, but if you're hiring somebody to create the public face of your organisation you deserve what you get if you didn't research properly.t
        
        "The owner has lost sales, lost the money he spent on his "expert" and lost man-hours trying to fix the problem. A "fuck em all it's their own fault" attitude is quite naive imo."
        
        Why did he hire the "expert"? Was he blindsided by a hugely promising professional whose credentials turned out to be false, or a highly recommended person from others knowledgeable in the field? Or did he just go for the cheapest option, or a guy he met in a bar who said he knew this stuff?
        
        If the former, I have a lot of sympathy. If the latter, he got what he deserved.
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        Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 4:39am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        "Why did he hire the "expert"? Was he blindsided by a hugely promising professional whose credentials turned out to be false, or a highly recommended person from others knowledgeable in the field? Or did he just go for the cheapest option, or a guy he met in a bar who said he knew this stuff?
        
        If the former, I have a lot of sympathy. If the latter, he got what he deserved."
        
        This is exactly my point and why I objected to what John said above. There are victims of this both deserving and undeserving to say punishing them all is a good thing seems to miss the nuance of the situation.
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        PaulT (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 5:18am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        I know the point you're making, but it's really a case of caveat emptor. We don't know whether a person got into the situation via malice, ignorance or naivete, but without knowing the specifics of any particular case it's hard to have sympathy. There will be innocent victims, but "I shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of the contractors I hired to represent my business" really isn't a great rebuttal.
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
        
        Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 5:56am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        Except they are being held accountable by Google... The extra hate seems unreasonable is all.
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        John Fenderson (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 10:26am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        There are victims of this both deserving and undeserving to say punishing them all is a good thing seems to miss the nuance of the situation.
        
        I don't think it does at all. In a sense, it's no different than if you hire an incompetent person to configure your email relay. If they botch the job, your relay will be blacklisted. You get off the blacklist by fixing the problem. It ensures that people will actually fix the issue in a timely way. This is no different.
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        alanbleiweiss (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 10:55am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Heh
        I agree. Its a difficult issue for sure. However it definitely emphasizes the concept of proper due diligence. Something seriously lacking in the business world.
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- art guerrilla (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 6:31am
  
  Re: Heh
  i don't get it...
  
  i get that comment sections of blogs get the 'my sister made $15235 from home...' crap (and -really- easy to ignore at its low level), but email spam ?
  
  who gets that crap ?
  i don't think i have a LOT of email accounts, prob average (5-6?), but i hardly EVER, get ANY 'spam'...
  what am i doing wrong ?
  
  i get LOTS of 'junk email' that i technically signed up for when i created any of a million fucking 'accounts' you are forced to register for at practically every fucking website in the world, but i get close to ZERO unsolicited emails...
  
  i seriously doubt my ISP is doing anything special in filtering it out, and i don't have anything particular set up in thunderbird, but i don't get much/any spam...
  
  at work, we have the idiotic barracuda 'spam filter' crap, and it is total shit: THE ONLY THING it has blocked have been legitimate emails, NOT SPAM !
  AND it CONTINUES to block them, even after i've said "these emails are okay"...
  
  oh well...
  guess i have to watch monty python for my spam...
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  - John Fenderson (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 9:05am
    
    Re: Re: Heh
    Create a moderately popular website and put your email address on it. After a week or two, you'll get all the spam you can eat.
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- Dan J., 19 Dec 2013 @ 9:39am
  
  Re: Heh
  If they're not spammers and hired a dubious company, perhaps this will teach them to be more careful in who they hire in the future. If no one hired them, the sleazy companies wouldn't stay in business. And if I were running a popular website like this, I'd add functionality so that the spam comments don't show up for a normal user but DO show up when being read by a Google bot.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:46pm

Thus this means I can continue to post tones of Wikipedia links?
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- Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 6:14am
  
  Re:
  Only if you warn people to turn down the volume on their speakers first.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Boojum (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:50pm

Google isn't punishing anyone
Google really isn't punishing anyone, they are just improving their product. Their product is to link people with the content they are most interested in. In general, the spam sites are NOT the spots people are most interested in. So the changes to their algorithm moves them downwards in the responses.

It's no more punishment than it is to not return Automobile web pages when the searcher was looking for the history of the NSA.

Now they don't like it, certainly! But it's not being done to punish them, it's being done to make Google a better search engine for the people doing the searches.

Boojum
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- Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:57pm
  
  Re: Google isn't punishing anyone
  I agree completely. If you hire an SEO company to game the ranking system, you deserve to be deranked. If you truly want to be ranked higher on search engines, work on your site content, and rank will come in it's own time.
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- indy, 18 Dec 2013 @ 3:45pm
  
  Re: Google isn't punishing anyone
  They are punishing people.
  
  Company A makes a great product. Doesn't use any SEO.
  
  Company B makes competing product, and spams company A's product all over the web.
  
  Google reduces visibility of company A's product pages.
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  - PaulT (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 1:00am
    
    Re: Re: Google isn't punishing anyone
    Do you have an example of this actually happening, or is this just a case of assuming the worst because the "G" word is mentioned?
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mickmel (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:50pm

Here's my response, especially if they "thank" me for the link
Here is the e-mail that you should have sent:

"I know you are busy but I would really appreciate a favor. We really screwed up when we hired a company to do search marketing for us because they went out and placed many spam comments on sites including yours. We're sorry that we were responsible for that.

We're getting our comeuppance now because Google is punishing our search rankings because we have so many spammy links to our site. I know that this is all completely our fault, but it would mean a lot to us if you could delete this offending content from your site."

Please don't pin the blame for this on us. Show a bit of remorse and we'll be happy to help.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 1:53pm

Speaking from complete ignorance on how these things actually work -

Is it possible to put the spam comments on a dedicated link spam article? Not just the ones people are asking to be removed, but all the ones the filters catch as well.

Real articles remain spam free while the links get counted and demoted.

'Course I could just be speaking nonsense here, but the idea amuses me.
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- John Fenderson (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:01pm
  
  Re:
  It's an interesting idea. However, not a good one. One common SEO tactic involves making just such a spam page. If TD did this, they'd just be doing some of the spammers work for them, and Google would end up delisting TD itself as a spam site.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:40pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Not if Google setup a guideline for declaring a specific page as such and just using such pages for demotions which I think is the sort of thing he was suggesting.
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- Jeremy, 18 Dec 2013 @ 10:54pm
  
  I was thinking the same thing. But the 3rd to last paragraph mentions that this site probably isn't considered a "link spammer". So I'm guessing that it could be very bad to start having pages that have nothing but spam links on them. So I'm thinking that if this site did decide to start "punishing" spammers then it could take spam comments that got through and repost one into the comments of every 5th article that's at least 5 months old. That way readers probably won't see it, but Google will and count it towards that site's spammage without considering Techdirt a spam link site. Or Techdirt can take the high road remove the links. Personally I think the best route would be the middle road, "hey, good job getting spam through our filters, time for you to face the consequences..."
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:03pm

you had me up until you said that you spoke to a real person at google�. that's just cray cray.
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mattshow (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:29pm

Extagen Male Enhancement tablets are Ranked #1. If you are looking for a safe, effective, natural male enhancement solution, then Start Today and place your order for FREE TRIAL PACK Try Extagen today and experience the results for yourself. Visit us at www.RIAA.com
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- Ninja (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 2:15am
  
  Re:
  Well, it is said that there's a perceived enlargement by the female public when the guy has yachts and luxury cars in his portfolio =/
  
  I'm not sure if the weed and the hookers are into the equation though >.>
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Frankz (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:29pm

Maybe
I don't think Google is actually punishing them for the spam links. They're just no longer rewarding them for it, causing a drop in rankings to where their site should have been all along. The sites are then misinterpreting that as a punishment.
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- Techanon, 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:46pm
  
  Re: Maybe
  That makes sense. Voiding the misrepresented scores works too and is less problematic than actually punishing them spammers with negative scores.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:29pm

I think you should keep the site clean. Who cares where the spammer sites are listed?
If you can hide the spam then thats good enough, just dont leave them up intentionally.
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alanbleiweiss (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:37pm

SEO, Spam and Googles Logic
Okay as an actual SEO professional (one who only advocates real, sustainable SEO, and not crappy spam tactics), I will add this:

1. It IS punishment. Spam has gotten so far out of hand over the years that previous efforts to discourage and otherwise eliminate otherwise undeserving results from the organic listings were not getting the message across. Spam just became a massive business.

So to really send the message across, Google is now much more SEVERELY penalizing sites that use spam tactics, one of which is crappy link techniques. The notion here being that when a site gets a manual penalty for crap links, it becomes a very daunting task to clean up now.

Couple that with most of those sites then needing to re-earn (or in actually earn for the first time in legitimate ways) rankings, and more sites are doing all they can to become good netizens.

2. Leaving spam comments up just to spite foolish site owners is NOT helpful to TechDirt. And it doesn't contribute to punishing those site owners because they'll just disavow the links if you leave them up.

In fact, where it CAN be a problem for TechDirt is if Google's system detects too many spam comments, this site WILL be penalized.

I doubt there are that many on TD, so it's highly unlikely that this scenario would happen (as compared to sites like Mashable or others that have free-for-all comment spam where those are more likely to see some sort of hit).

3. Charging site owners to remove their links is a possible revenue stream, however the overwhelming majority of site owners or link-clean-up providers who encounter a fee situation ignore it and just disavow those links.

And for those site owners who come to me for an audit after they've been penalized, that's exactly what I recommend to them. Along with noting in their tracking of their clean-up those sites that attempted to charge for the service. Because that's potentially subject to being viewed as an extortion scheme under some circumstances (not a TD scenario though either).
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- Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:04pm
  
  Re: SEO, Spam and Googles Logic
  2. Leaving spam comments up just to spite foolish site owners is NOT helpful to TechDirt. And it doesn't contribute to punishing those site owners because they'll just disavow the links if you leave them up.
  
  In fact, where it CAN be a problem for TechDirt is if Google's system detects too many spam comments, this site WILL be penalized.
  
  The links are already disavowed because of nofollow HTML tagging. Techdirt can't be punished for them, [and as you acknowledge, nether can the spam contrary to what they believe].
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - alanbleiweiss (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:22pm
    
    Re: Re: SEO, Spam and Googles Logic
    ah thanks for the nofollow factor - I totally failed to check to see if they were nofollowed. Proving my "forensic SEO audit" skills aren't always used when I comment on the web. :-)
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - out_of_the_blue, 18 Dec 2013 @ 7:18pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: SEO, Spam and Googles Logic
      He mentioned that in the article.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- techflaws (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 10:44pm
  
  Re: SEO, Spam and Googles Logic
  (one who only advocates real, sustainable SEO, and not crappy spam tactics)
  
  Now that's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 2:50pm

Re: Hey Guys!
Epic.
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toyotabedzrock (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 3:19pm

Post the spam
Move all comment spam to a /spam link on techdirt so google can hammer them appropriately.
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Gracey (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 3:30pm

I got one of those this week as well.

Oddly ... the website they wanted the link removed from wasn't one of mine, nor had I ever heard of it before.

They have to spam people's emails too?
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rob, 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:06pm

Crap Links
I've had a number of these requests also. I've been amused that they don't have an accent.

Pardon me sir. Would you please be taking down these links which unfortunately have been coming to bite us in the bum from Google.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2013 @ 4:37pm

The requests are also spam, by the way
Remember that the proper definition of spam (in the context of email) is "unsolicited bulk email". We chose that deliberately: it says nothing about the purpose of the email, or its contents, or its subject, or its sender, or anything else. (For example, blank spam is still unquestionably spam.)

So the same spammers who have abused web forums with their filth are now abusing the mailboxes of the operators of web forums with unsolicited bulk email requesting that their earlier spam be cleaned up.

Since, unfortunately, spam is not yet a capital crime (a change I would STRONGLY support) the only real recourse is to blacklist them -- and that's exactly what I'd do. Have done. ;-) There is no reason to give any spammer any service or response whatsoever: there is every reason to blacklist them for life.
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Chilly8, 18 Dec 2013 @ 5:30pm

The proglem with Forum spam is that a lot of it comes through proxies and VPNs. The only way to do it is to block all traffic coming via proxies, VPNs, and the like. I had to do that a few years ago, because of one problem user who just would not get the message that he was not welcome. When I started blocking proxies and VPNs, the amount of forum spam on my site went down as well, though some still gets through at times.
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Rajani Isa, 18 Dec 2013 @ 6:04pm

Re: Link Removal
I say charge them for it.

Make it, say, $1 per removed link. But also note that you will bill them for the time your employees use, and won't remove until payment is received and cleared, and charge fees for CC payments, Paypal payments, and Checks.

I figure you could get them to have o pony up 20-30 US$ easy. Per link.
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alanbleiweiss (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 9:37pm

"We Want To Break Their Spirits"
Just saw this:

Matt Cutts, head of Googles Search Spam unit stated on the record over on TWIT.TV their intent with the way they are going after spammers:

"If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we�ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let�s just stay on the high road from now on."

So my position that it IS punishment, in my opinion based on this statement,is correct. Punishment is designed to break people of a bad habit.

Here's the link to the full audio
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- alanbleiweiss (profile), 18 Dec 2013 @ 9:40pm
  
  Re: "We Want To Break Their Spirits"
  oh - forgot to mention credit for the word for word transcript and my being alerted to this goes to an article from Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand
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k-h, 18 Dec 2013 @ 11:44pm

Make a special page for them
Make a special page for them so you can leave them there just for google's spam ranking.
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Jack Yan, 19 Dec 2013 @ 12:21am

Spam to remove spam
We get these regularly, too�although I admit I got duped by the first one. Usually, the ones we get are those that say they are doing us a favour. The craziest one was a web developer asking us to remove a link from our directory�obviously this SEO �expert� decided that the best way to rid themselves of these links was to spam anyone with one, including legitimate sites. So to remove spam, they engaged in spam. Nice one.
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shawnhcorey (profile), 19 Dec 2013 @ 6:27am

So, take them down.
Just delete them...and bill them for 5 minutes of your time. Maybe then, they'll won't post them in the first place�.

� And if you believe that, I have some ocean-front property in Arizona that you might be interested in.
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- Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 12:13pm
  
  Re: So, take them down.
  I think you should bill them up front for 5 minutes of your time (Valued at $10,000 per hour). After receiving the money and it has cleared the bank, add the link removal to your "To do" list with an approximate ETA of 3-4 months. If they would like expedited service, let them know for an additional service charge of $5,000 that they could have it reduced to about 2 months wait.
  
  =P
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Crazy Canuck, 19 Dec 2013 @ 12:08pm

NSA
Hello,

I'm from the NSA and we instigated a program to secretly add links to our website via secret backdoors we designed into all Internet infrastructure. We thought that this may help improve our Google rating and thus improve how the general public perceives us. It has come to our attention that this program has in fact caused the opposite reaction. We would kindly ask that you remove the links to us immediately, otherwise we may be forced to invest in a new program to create a new secret backdoor to remove the link ourselves.

Sincerely,
Your Big Brother

PS: It'd be a shame if your friends found out what websites you were surfing last night...
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Dec 2013 @ 10:22pm

Combating filesharing is more important than combating spam.

/s
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Peter Wakefield Sault, 22 Dec 2013 @ 4:06am

Getting Back to Reality
So google, which spams up the whole internet with its syndicated ads, doesn't like competition. What else is new?
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Mark Noo, 8 May 2014 @ 4:05pm

I do the same thing as you. I leave the spam if it got through. I am nowhere nearly as popular as techdirt is but I think it serves them right.
First they violate us, then they ask us to pick up the mess.

I wonder what Google will do to me. I have a blog on addiction but degrees in Business and even a AAS as a paralegal.
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Mirna, 28 Feb 2017 @ 4:35pm

Can you do a case study on SerpClix? I used it to move up 5 spots to #8, but it won't move it further. Can you test it, or link me to a study where you have tested it?
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