SEO spam - wakey wakey, the bubbles burst!

That gets me thinking that, of the 270 staff, most of them are probably people offering gigs at fiverr rather than doing any of the real work themselves. They charge you, and then pay 5 dollars a piece to get your site spammed all over the net.

I don't know, these days where there are as many new updates coming out as there are days in the week, it looks like there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, but somehow I doubt it. They will find another way of doing it. Its just a matter of time, and researching. Hopefully, in that time the actual marketers could try restore some faith in the business that once was SEO.

It's quite interesting running Biz Directories, because we are a good hunting ground for the lazy SEO'ers. We've had to roll out automated block lists because of the volume of rubbish.

But recently, we've actually started contacting a few businesses on our site, where they are obviously all above board, but then get hammered with 10 or 15 positive reviews in pigeon English, blatant and obvious self promo or someone tries to relist the same business umpteen times with different keyword combinations.

9 times out of 10, it's a mickey mouse SEO company that's done it, and when you speak to the actual business owner, they are genuinely mortified, angry and embarrassed as they are paying out a lot of money in good faith to these SEO muppets.

Trouble is, this rubbish is replicated across hordes of directories with countless duplicate cheesy reviews, which Mr G is now going to start penalising So the poor innocent biz owner is out of pocket, and then gets whacked by Google

Lazy SEO at its worse and the sooner it dies out, the better for everyone.

Its the likes of these spammers that give the industry a bad name and make 'proper' SEOs roles within the industry much more difficult.

We rank no 1 for our target (local) terms for web design, and since we hit no 1 we are bombarded with similar emails.

You can usually tell they are junk by the way they 'tell' you what you need to do for your clients, with their basic site analysis.

Here is a classic I received a few days ago (on the crackers site, their email in red and my response in black):

Hello my name is Ophelia Parker and I am an Internet and Website Specialist.
I was looking up websites in Google under the keyword search christmas
crackers wholesale and came upon your website Christmas Crackers & Luxury Christmas Crackers | Uniquely Crackers. I
see that you are not ranked on the first page for your primary keyword
searches.

Now for one, I rank quite highly for my target keywords given the site is young. And how the heck do you know what my target is?

There is no reason that you can