I was visited by an anonymous person who showed their lack of intelligence and understanding of real issues. It claims that “THERE are 2 types of spam. There is junk, virus and nonsense spam and then there is people who are just trying to make a living. And us ADULTS have the choice of using THEIR services or buying THEIR products or just deleting THEIR mails.”
Specifically spamming this web designer who hates spam is a bad plan because I am going to look at your offer and website and show people how bad you are. You see any business that has to resort to spam is in trouble for a number of reasons. The biggest they are in danger of losing their email account and their web accounts. I get loads of spam and there are two types there’s good spam and there’s bad spam.
I am calling on all tweeter to help remove the scourge of the magpie advert. Do not sign up and start sending them. To all that receive these horrible spammy tweets, Unfollow the culprit after a warning.
Its sad that nothing remains inviolate from the spammer community.
Yesterday I wrote about Ed Dale and his 30 day challenge teaching people spammy techniques. This is not an apology, I still think that Ed Dale teaches spammy techniques amongst some of the really good stuff he teaches.
Here is Ed Dale’s response
“Hi Guy,
What I teach is not spam - I teach and expect people to deliver champagne content - If you don’t - a pox on your house
I also teach people to be vibrant, active participants in their community.
Painting and entire community as “inconsiderate, illiterate, uncouth cockroaches these underhanded, slimy, bottom feeders” I would suggest is a tad unfair.
Thanks for allowing me to respond
Ed”
I have a few questions for Ed Dale though about the 30 Day Challenge. As a person who learned a lot from Ed Dale, I have a problem with a few of the things he teaches. I actually like much of the stuff he teaches and use it regularly. There are a few things though that I consider to be below the belt.
On Day 23 of the 30 day challenge Ed Dale introduces you to the Content theft software from Word Press Direct as loved by sploggers all over the world. You may have to register to access this. But Ed gives you access to the software that allows you to rip off content from other websites and blogs. My question to Ed is you stated in your response that you teach people to “deliver Champagne content” Does this champagne content include content stolen from others hard work?
You say you teach people to become “vibrant, active participants in their community” but you suggest that they use keywords as a nome de Plume. Is this not just a smidge spammy? Surely you are better recognised as a “vibrant, active participants in their community” using a real name?
You next state that painting an entire community as “inconsiderate, illiterate, uncouth cockroaches these underhanded, slimy, bottom feeders” as a tad unfair. I ask if you would be happy having your work published verbatim on various content thieving inconsiderate, illiterate, uncouth cockroaches websites. Now please note I never painted the entire industry just those that are too damned lazy to create their own content. Do you still think I am a tad unfair or are those that I referred to as inconsiderate, illiterate, uncouth cockroaches and underhanded, slimy, bottom feeders a tad unfair?
You sir are teaching them these techniques along with all the good stuff that you do teach. Maybe a change to your syllabus may be in order. Let the bottom feeding scum find these black hat techniques on their own. That way I will not get as many pingbacks from sploggers with no mercy, no integrity or manners.
I won’t get stupid remarks from brain dead individuals that can obviously not read like the following. I would hope that someone that has a PR4 blog would be neither a spammer or a splogger.
“I would have loved to have backlinked your article to my pr 4 blog but it appears you would consider that spam. Shame that.”
First I am going to tell you what a splogger is and how to identify sploggers. Sploggers are content thieves. They use your and my RSS feed to create a website. In fact there is software available to the splogging community that searches the web for articles that mention their keywords. They then copy and paste your content to their websites. Some of them will even link back to your website with some inane link like “This great article originally posted by”and your blog name.
You see a pingback and assume it’s a compliment to your writing skills and you publish it. They do this a thousand times a day, hoping that you will publish the pingback. You do so and using your content and your vote these sites get better Google rankings. Factually the site with the most links is more likely to be higher on Google than the one with less.
So Sploggers use your content and your back link to become more important on the Internet than you are for your own content. It’s fairly simple to identify splogs. When you click back to the site and go to the front page you will see nothing original. The site is likely to have a dozen short articles linking back to other peoples articles.
Or even worse you will see sites that have advertising on them with no content. Delete these pingbacks and never publish them.
Ed Dale of the 30 day challenge will teach you to make a $. I liked the 30 day challenge because I learned a lot from Ed Dale. But here is the thing Ed Dale is always going on about Spam and not to do it. One of the first things he teaches you however is to build backlinks using spammy techniques. Yes he says you must add to the conversation but then suggests you use your keywords as a name when commenting on blogs.
This is wrong and is going to upset people. I like talking to people not key words. If you are trying to add to the conversation and are using keywords as a name, I will not add you as a commentor to my blog. In fact I may add your comment but I will remove the back links.
So you sign in as Cheap Car Insurance you get no airtime because sir, you are a spammer.
The second thing that Ed teaches people is to use Content from other peoples sites as bait on your own site. Thats right duplicate someone else’s content and link to their site as attribution. You see in the spammers mind this is not an unreasonable tactic. Steal and attribute. The sad thing is that people using full content RSS feeds to make it easier for their readers to read what they have written in the RSS readers are now finding their posts posted verbatim on many other sites by the splogging thieves.
What makes it even worse is that these splogging thieves do pingbacks getting the unwary to link back to the splog sites, giving these splog sites more backlinks improving their Google positioning. That means that these splog sites get seen as more important than the original articles because they have more backlinks.
Ed Dale is one of the architects of the training teaching these inconsiderate, illiterate, uncouth cockroaches these underhanded, slimy, bottom feeding techniques.
Guy McLaren is also an internet marketer who will not stoop to the depths plumbed by the Ed Dales of the world.
In recent days many link directories have lost their page rank. It is assumed that Google is penalizing them for having paid links. In my opinion many directories exist for only one reason and that is to farm links. Link farms were appearing higher in the Google rankings and in many cases were just a waste of time and effort.
Link Farms and Directories
Directories that are created purely to sell links or get rankings are not worth joining. Having said that, I know that industry specific Directories can be good for a business, yet directories without any useful content are doomed to failure.
Links back to your website are important but heres the thing, Having links from paid directories with no ties to your business are a waste of time. A site dedicated to Linux was penalised for having paid for links to casinos and adult content sites. I am sure you will agree that those have no link to linux.
Quality Links
I bet everyone is wondering what a good link is.
Links from industry specific sites are good.
Links from blogs dealing with the subject at hand.
Links in sites with authoritive and relevant content
Links from sites that do not link to link farms and questionable sites
Links in Blog Rolls.
Links you have not paid for.
You are who you associate with
So the thing here is when you ask someone to link to you check their credentials. If the majority of sites linking to you link to questionable sites you will not get credit for those links, In fact you may even get penalized. You are known for the company you keep.
Some of the biggest directories on the net have just learnt that the hard way. They are not even appearing at the top of the list when searching for their brands. Directories that are feeling the pain include; Aviva. Alive, Big Web Links, ewebpages, Directory Dump, Elegant Directory and many more.
Free for all (FFA) directories
Another place to stay away from are the Free For All(FFA) directories, They give you no benefit whatsoever because they are link farms that the Search Engines do not approve of. Before trying the short cuts rather write an authoritive article and submit it to ezines and other sites that desire good content.
Jail4Bail The most talked about spam or is it?
The Jail4Bail campaign has upset some folks and I feel for them. Just because its a good cause does not mean that we should be bombarded in social media. There is a point of over exposure. Make no mistake if this had been an email campaign with as many mails been sent, the campaign would have been labeled spam.
I agree with Wezzo, I too didn’t have a clue what the campaign was about. I just saw Jail4Bail every time I opened Twitter, Every Time I went to Muti there was yet another Jail4Bail campaign. I am rather curious as to whether the social media spamming made people aware of Autism, Whether it got people sending their SMS’s. In fact the South African social network is pretty limited. I would even say incestuous. Everyone that “counts” is known, in fact most of them are continuously writing articles about how great their mates are.
Wezzo said The Jail4Bail campaign is social media spam.
To be honest I didn’t really know what the Jail4Bail campaign was all about, I still don’t. I knew it had to do with someone locking himself in a jail cell and only leaving if a certain amount had been raised for some or other cause. The ground breaking concept didn’t excite me enough to read up more about it.
The Biz Community article was more about Rafiq Phillips than the cause. This is great marketing for Mr Phillips who as we all know is super connected, but is not much use for Gerhard Pieterse. I have not seen any reason why I should support the cause, NO data on what autism is and how it differs from any one of a million other causes. Its all about the marketing of the cause. Why should I care?
Gerhard Pieterse, the executive director of Autism Western Cape, has committed himself to voluntary imprisonment as a fund-raising exercise in support of autism. With the goal of reaching R1 000 000 in raised funds, initially, the marketing of Jail4Bail has been much as you would expect: using traditional press releases, and relying on conventional media to spread the word.
To be frank, A well designed website with all the data, The reasons I should care, focus on me and the benefits of me getting involved in the campaign, less on the wonderful marketing opportunities offered by web2.0. Why should I care that Jail4Bail is using web2.0 as a marketing tool to market web 2.0. If Mr Phillips was as slick as he is painted he would have known that he would be accused of spamming the networks. He would have varied the coverage and used a larger footprint with less invasive methods.
Using web 2.0 is not abusing Web 2.0.