I’m an SEO and totally agree with you Mark. I’ve never resorted to what you describe because I’ve never had to. However, if I had clients competing for terms like “weight loss,” I would really feel the pain, so much so, I wouldn’t take the client because I wouldn’t want to have to resort to those tactics. That’s a sad state of affairs, isn’t it? So I work contentedly with local businesses who aren’t up against competitors who can afford the $100K a month for SEO to outrank their competitors.

But even in smaller markets, I run into problems. In my SEO research for my insurance client today who wants to gain the state market, I found a competitor who is very cleverly building his backlinks by creating his own external websites (note the s) to link from. They all appear legitimate, insurance-related sites all linking back to him with relevant links coming from a relevant site. In short, he built his own web, and Google is playing happily in his sandbox. It’s so well done that I think it will be hard for Google to detect that it’s all a fake. I can see that they even built in decoys to keep Google at bay.

Google is trying hard to put an end to this, but clearly we are not there yet. Fraudulent sites are still being rewarded. And black hat SEOs are getting rich. But over time I expect to see social search and user feedback to become the signals that the search engines will rely more on over time as they are harder to manipulate — at least now it is.

First of all most links in blog comments are NoFollow, so those link add no value.

Second if you think outsourcing to create fake accounts are wrong. Then welcome to the internet in general. New dating websites, forums, etc… all use fake accounts. Even big sites like match.com.

Third, have you ever heard of auto-commenting programs or blog commenting software like comment kahuna?

Fourth, Google knows what are comments and places little value if any into them.

Fifth, he’s lying about $200,000/month. The vp of marketing would be fired if that was the case. The company would hire a consultant to help setup an in-house team. Think about it. Plus if a company can afford that much then they really don’t need much for SEO.

Finally, Real SEO consultants don’t blog comment. Waste of time.

Mark great article and this hits home as well. My wife’s fitness blog was blasted with fake comments with links and they were not even clever in hiding them, they were just trying to get links. FYI good reason to make commenting a form sign in with info. like this one and maybe even moderate and make the final call before letting it go live.

I am working as an SEO and want to say that this fake work is being used today by most of the company and their clients are also happy. Apart from this you must have seen that there are many website available who are selling facebook and twitter followers, Here also you just got follower because you paid some amount, they are not following you because they like something and this following factor highly effect the search results. In this scenario what we suppose to do ?

Amen, Mark! That goes for your heading and the last paragraph in particular. But this whole post sums up my feelings about the way SEO seems to be going. It is getting really tough for the small, honest folks without huge budgets and without the inclination to go the black hat route. SEO isn’t what it used to be.

Hi, I am fed up with SEO! Despite what Google says it is NOT about content but about inbound links many of which are bogus!

I agree with everyone. Check out my comments and why Obama agrees with me http://www.webpronews.com/why-seo-disgusts-me-2011-06#comments tits

Thanks Mark its great that you are finding these people and speaking from the point of view of the employee’s. The reality is though the ideas and skill are taught from the top down, you mention the corporate bills of companies and highlight the reality of the people who do the grunt work for the top companies. For me this is good because it relaxes me about the way I felt these past few months, having to go into sites and delete all these back-links. If any-ones interested, I would like to explain the solutions I took with the problems to troubleshoot and a possible explanation of why this happened, and then perhaps rant on about the simple conspiracy that makes more people move into a position of being in this trap.

First of all the title of this post explains a lot of things based on comments around the internet these past few weeks, bloggers whining about how blog posts are becoming littered with SEO input. Perhaps this is true but for any marketer it is something very essential, whether it contacting valid sources or adding valuable data into your feed there is no way around this. Might I add this blog is a great source of SEO information and has helped me articulate something as the data came in and as I got the feed back I needed to understand another acronym that stopped me in tracks like a rabbit on the road. Its ok all acronyms do this, I had the same sing in chat with OMG, PP Lol and other stuff.

The truth is people whining about textual SEO are in fact visual people, with the cool side of images and the rise of places like Tumbler we can all understand why. We also live in an age where people by music for there computer then have a choice of which icon to use for the cover, why they could even edit it and make it even more groovy. Unlike the texters and more literate, there is an underlying urgency to go back and edit. Especially since there are so many places old stuff can be re published in new places.

So here’s the problem, I spend oh over a month looking at the figures traffic rise, its very good, with not even a single post, you feel happy, but then the you notice why and the problems with back-end and front end traffic. So the software these guys use is back-end, that still is clunky on your server, with addition to the bonus it gives to the websites these links go-to or the wheel they are involved in. Deleting is time consuming although having spent weeks deleting then realising how much easier it was to delete I kinda realise its not that bad the life of a website Admin. Now we know most top website entrepreneurs are employing these likely lads in far of countries, and they compared to the World is flat principle they are earning a lot of money for what they do. But the key thing is education for most comes at a price, and some merits are not recognised as employable attributes in others, so its difficult to define colours grey, white black between saints, sinners or ethical practitioners, this is something for the search engines to decide and figure out. Especially since the sponsors that they deal with are paying customers to.

Understanding the topdown approach, then receiving information can often turn out to be disinformation, now please do not think I am having a pop at WebProNews because I have enjoyed all the free stuff you have provided as well as the priceless newsletter, in-fact if anything its definitely making me feel a bit to clever. If its happening to me then I sure it s happening to others, we have like super-brains with this thing. Yes on good days we get it right and things spike. When these things pike this is when you get tracked down. By sending a load of links this inevitably causes problems. The source of these problems often comes form disinformation. For example, the comments box can be a key source of this. There are different comment boxes that provide special API keys, these keys in essence could give commentaries the ability to comment, even after the comment box is deleted, if the settings a not explained and the box is forgotten about the links can still come through that comment box and show up in the approved box. My tip is delete maybe 200 at a time instead of twenty, also try and set any comment box you join to moderate and approve after a certain amount of protocols, also I think it should be common knowledge having these posts instantly deleted have a period of time should resolve such things. In the long term I think this is why the bigger companies need to keep paying these people and keep sharing new ways of educating them. Fast cash is partly what this is all about, being smarter and thinking smarter is also very helpful. But when it comes to stories of people earning money that is where we all relate, well done Mark.

Oh finally with the posting thing, I notice a statistical move from Words to images, its like the blogger to Tumble figures, is this something worth highlighting, I have no knowledge, but on good images I do see a remarkable amount of reposts, and is this something that perhaps these things I highlight are something that needs to be considered there to or is what you say here with the Intel you have on your end suggest that all these shenanigans are soon to fizzle out in there effects?

Well, didn’t take long for the comment spam to appear here, did it… I use WordPress on most of my sites. The Akismet plugin is truly remarkable at catching spam comments. I was looking at one little blog yesterday and it is getting nearly 2,000 spam comments per month

This is a technique that has been widely used for a long time, is has gotten a little cleaner than it used to be, back in the day, there would be no comments at all, just links being posted. In some competitive markets the only way to compete is by going on the darker side of grey hat, or even full black hat, such as casinos, dating and online pharmacy products, you have to do this in these markets because everyone else is doing it too. In time though I do believe Google and other search engines will work out a way to make this technique obsolete, for now though, it is a good way for black hat seos to make quick and big money, so as soon as it doesn’t make them money any more it will stop happening. It would be better if they were to hire professional bloggers that were knowledgble on the subject they are writing about and would respond to comments on their posts, then the links on the posts would be of value and would also convert better. I think just paying a random person who has no extended knowledge on the subject that they are posting about is a very amateur approach.

Big Business have been doing this for years and you only decided to speak out when it personally effected you?

A person of your standing in the community, needed to be more proactive when you first recognised it. It has gone too far now and what’s worse is that these same bloggers are being used to destroy competitors sites as well. How they do this is simple – send thousands of irrelevant links to a competitors site and their site will be penalised by Google.

At the end of the day the buck has to stop with Google. If Google doesn’t start policing the internet then governments around the world will just have to take over Google. This is possible under a Labor Government in Australia because it is written in their policies that they can take over any company in the country they want without paying a cent. We currently have a Labor Government. Hope I dont scare any investors away

Another thing too is that it just isnt going to matter anymore in the future as there wont be any organic listings on the front page of Google for your searches, just a bunch of Google Apps like Adwords, Google News, YouTube, Maps, Suggestions, etc (probably Google Shopping as well).

I really miss the old Google…

Apart from the SEO rubbish, the worst thing about the internet is that the majority of traffic generated downloading waste-less comments such as this. This page alone is 1054 KB. Uncompressed it is 1824kb. Really? The original article is 1 1/2 pages long. I don’t want to download another 20 pages of strangers opinions, another 1 1/2 Mb. We don’t really care about what you think, what you tweet or if you “Like It”. I am against even writing this… Just write some good content for a change. If it is good, they will come. Our site has a robots file that simply contains DISALLOW: /* and we attract high traffic. SEO is the late night infomercial of the internet and any “SEO specialist” is the “I am not a paid actor” with the fake 6 pack and the orange face.

Anyone can have good marketing, only a few have something worth advertising. -MD

I do my own SEO. My main focus is quality content, and trying to fill empty niches that are relevant to what I do (following the “write what you know” concept).

I stick to white hat SEO religiously. I occasionally comment (myself, under my name) on blogs but that has little value. I do strongly believe in the concept of link bait. But good link bait requires creativity, and quality content. It helps if your link bait is something you genuinely care about instead of a trick.

All the little tricks in SEO matter at the margins. If you’re trying to compete in a market where there already is quality content, that’s a big hill to climb. There are still many arenas where there is no quality content, and then SEO tricks might matter.

But the biggest secret of all is to stay focused, laserlike, on delivering quality content. Over the long haul, that’s what really matters. Even the best SEO techniques (white hat or black) will not help if you’re trying to push crappy content ahead of good content.

The ultimate problem is there are too few people interested in the hard work of producing good content, and too many people willing to pay for SEO to promote their weak content.

I built my own substantial website, hand-coding in html, and writing every word myself. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts on my main blog plus hundreds of others on my other blogs.

My competitors spend tens of thousands of dollars on SEO. Their SEOs push them to write content but they just can’t, or won’t, do it. In my world (law) there are many good lawyers having their websites written by non-lawyers. Attorneys who write 100-page briefs and memoranda don’t find the time to write a few hundred words of content for their website, or even one blog post a month. Then the attorneys complain when the money doesn’t buy success.

Because ultimately it’s not about the SEO tricks. It’s about good content. And it’s not the fault of the SEOs. They do try to get their clients to write content. I’ve heard this from both the lawyers and the SEOs.

Very interesting article on a prevalent problem.
Seems like the practice of seeding fake comments should have been expected though. Just another cold call on the phone at dinner time.

Thanks for this informative posting, Mark. I’ve been the victim of a hoax, and would like to avoid all involvement with such people in the future!!