Nice article on SearchDay to keep our work in the right perspective!

Nice article to keep our work in the right perspective.

Google PageRank Lunacy


By Mike Grehan

The quest by some to improve their Google PageRank score seems to have
reached the point of sheer madness. Even common decency may be
abandoned in futile attempts by desperate (or simply less educated)
online marketers and others who will seemingly stop at nothing to try
and gain links in hopes of seeing more green in their Google toolbar.

What I'd like to share with you in this article is a personal tale
about the actual personal harm such ill-advised linking campaigns can
inflict.

Unless you're a marketer who happens to work in commercial radio in
the UK, you wouldn't have heard the name Ed Harwood before. Ed was one
of the UK's leading and award winning, commercial copywriters.

Ed was my closest and dearest friend for 25 years. That was up until
he was tragically killed on his motorcycle last year.

If you've ever lost a relative or close friend so unsuspectingly,
you'll know the feeling of shock and the shadow of grief you
immediately fall under. Ed had a huge circle of friends and
acquaintances, so prompted by another friend, I immediately created a
memorial web page. A place where everyone who knew him could go and
share their own thoughts and memories of this great character by
posting them online.

Within a week the guest book (as it really was a simple CGI guest book
script I used) had over 100 entries and the memories and eulogies grew
each week.

Not long after his funeral, I received an email from Penny, Ed's wife.
She was obviously very upset and explained that she'd been to Ed's
memorial page to read the new entries and couldn't believe that
"someone had placed adverts on it."

It wasn't too long before I found myself receiving notes every couple
of days from people who had been to the memorial page and were
horrified to find promotional messages for ring-tones and other
affiliate type programs. And so I started my daily vigil of
downloading the memorial page and cleaning off the junk.

It has now reached a point where, I have taken down the form and
requested that people wishing to make an entry should email it to me
and I'll upload it. Of course, this takes away the whole point of
being able to express your feelings spontaneously, or even
anonymously.

I've also tried to explain to friends and family that, the entries for
ring-tones and other nonsense are actually created by bots (AKA
spam-bots). That they are software scripts developed to automate the
process of signing guest books and leaving links back to their
operators' own web pages.

Such activities have little impact on Google. The links often lack the
context that's an important factor to help pages rank well for
particular words. In addition, Google is known to have taken action to
downgrade, or disregard links that it finds in guest books, because
they are less trustworthy these days, than in the past, as a guide to
relevancy.

Programming a spam bot to relentlessly seek out guest books and
comment areas to dump links back to your own pages is a "brute force"
method that will produce little search engine gains, in my view.

But even if you don't believe me and my writings about effective link
building (PDF), are you really prepared to commit yourself to the
virtual desecration of someone's memorial site and bring pain to their
loved ones to sell a ring tone? If so, then why not head out to your
nearest cemetery with a can of spray paint and plaster your URL's on
the tombstones. Your actions in the virtual world of the web are the
same.

Yes, I know this a is a very personal message. But that's how these
spam bots and the people who operate them have affected me:
Personally.

I don't know if my words will have any effect on the spam bot problem
in general. But if it pricks the conscience of just one person who's
just about to launch his own program then it may be one less bit of
junk which a grieving friend or partner will have to scrape off their
loved ones memorial page.

Mike Grehan is a search marketing consultant, speaker and author of
Search Engine Marketing: The essential best practice guide.

Karl Hall
KaZaZZ! Search Engine
www.kazazz.com

"Karl Hall - www.kazazz.com" <karl (AT) kazazz (DOT) com> wrote

Nice article to keep our work in the right perspective.

Google PageRank Lunacy


By Mike Grehan

The quest by some to improve their Google PageRank score seems to have
reached the point of sheer madness. Even common decency may be
abandoned in futile attempts by desperate (or simply less educated)
online marketers and others who will seemingly stop at nothing to try
and gain links in hopes of seeing more green in their Google toolbar.

What I'd like to share with you in this article is a personal tale
about the actual personal harm such ill-advised linking campaigns can
inflict.

Unless you're a marketer who happens to work in commercial radio in
the UK, you wouldn't have heard the name Ed Harwood before. Ed was one
of the UK's leading and award winning, commercial copywriters.

Ed was my closest and dearest friend for 25 years. That was up until
he was tragically killed on his motorcycle last year.

If you've ever lost a relative or close friend so unsuspectingly,
you'll know the feeling of shock and the shadow of grief you
immediately fall under. Ed had a huge circle of friends and
acquaintances, so prompted by another friend, I immediately created a
memorial web page. A place where everyone who knew him could go and
share their own thoughts and memories of this great character by
posting them online.

Within a week the guest book (as it really was a simple CGI guest book
script I used) had over 100 entries and the memories and eulogies grew
each week.

Not long after his funeral, I received an email from Penny, Ed's wife.
She was obviously very upset and explained that she'd been to Ed's
memorial page to read the new entries and couldn't believe that
"someone had placed adverts on it."

It wasn't too long before I found myself receiving notes every couple
of days from people who had been to the memorial page and were
horrified to find promotional messages for ring-tones and other
affiliate type programs. And so I started my daily vigil of
downloading the memorial page and cleaning off the junk.

It has now reached a point where, I have taken down the form and
requested that people wishing to make an entry should email it to me
and I'll upload it. Of course, this takes away the whole point of
being able to express your feelings spontaneously, or even
anonymously.

I've also tried to explain to friends and family that, the entries for
ring-tones and other nonsense are actually created by bots (AKA
spam-bots). That they are software scripts developed to automate the
process of signing guest books and leaving links back to their
operators' own web pages.

Such activities have little impact on Google. The links often lack the
context that's an important factor to help pages rank well for
particular words. In addition, Google is known to have taken action to
downgrade, or disregard links that it finds in guest books, because
they are less trustworthy these days, than in the past, as a guide to
relevancy.

Programming a spam bot to relentlessly seek out guest books and
comment areas to dump links back to your own pages is a "brute force"
method that will produce little search engine gains, in my view.

But even if you don't believe me and my writings about effective link
building (PDF), are you really prepared to commit yourself to the
virtual desecration of someone's memorial site and bring pain to their
loved ones to sell a ring tone? If so, then why not head out to your
nearest cemetery with a can of spray paint and plaster your URL's on
the tombstones. Your actions in the virtual world of the web are the
same.

Yes, I know this a is a very personal message. But that's how these
spam bots and the people who operate them have affected me:
Personally.

I don't know if my words will have any effect on the spam bot problem
in general. But if it pricks the conscience of just one person who's
just about to launch his own program then it may be one less bit of
junk which a grieving friend or partner will have to scrape off their
loved ones memorial page.

Mike Grehan is a search marketing consultant, speaker and author of
Search Engine Marketing: The essential best practice guide.

Karl Hall
KaZaZZ! Search Engine
www.kazazz.com

Good post!

Thank you!

--
James Taylor
http://www.AICompany.com
http://www.SEO-highrankings.com

"Karl Hall - www.kazazz.com" wrote:

Nice article to keep our work in the right perspective.

Google PageRank Lunacy

By Mike Grehan

Thanks for posting that. Despite what Mike wrote, though, we
know from the SERPs contest that spam-botting *does* result
in high google placement, but i hope that reading it makes
folks like Sam / Chrissy / Bob take a moment to think about
the techniques they promote. Just because you CAN do it
doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

cat yronwode

Correspondence Course ------ http://www.luckymojo.com/mojocourse.html