The quality of the internet turning seo-black

Spam Comments
Sigh… A month ago I posted that the total amount of spam comments passed the 1K mark. Today, about a month later, the spam comments have reached passed the 3K mark.

RSS
Along with the increase I see a lot of content stealing that’s then used by blackhat SEO websites. The SEO techniques are very important to understand if you’re willing to run a decent website. But there are a lot of individuals who are abusing the system (for financial gains).

The statistics report that my RSS feeds are only “leeched”, but that there aren’t any “clickthru’s”. So I wonder if I should keep the RSS feeds online?!? Apparently it’s only used to leech content, and not that interesting to the returning visitors.

SEO Project
A while back I started a small POC project that combined all the SEO techniques I knew. The website was a wordpress blog with permalinks. I created a customized eBay plugin that would fetch data through the eBay API, and represent it on the blog. Each category had it’s own permalink (so it was very SE friendly), but it was only one page ran through variables. The categories contained the latest items along with the most popular search terms for that category. The plugin relies on a small redirect page to obfuscate the fact that it’s just eBay content publishing.

After submitting the site to Google, it took about one month to be fully indexed. At the start of the project I took time to write a few “original” articles to spice up the websites. Just to see what the effect would be between the two… One extra sidenote; I have not used any linking techniques to improve the traffic or rating of the site. It was just about the permalink & content effect.

The results after three months:

• Visitors : ~30 / day
• Article ratio : 5% (The articles have some hits, but 95% is on the eBay plugin.)
• Income (last month) : 0.80€ (eBay redirect) & 0.10€ (adsense)
• Ranking : Pagerank 0 & Alexa 0

The income is extremely low, but if you bare in mind that this website was just a small POC project to check what the impact of SEO was… Without maintaining this site, it would be self sufficient for it’s domain costs. Where even this website has a lower revenue than this POC project… 😉

(NOTE: the domain will be taken offline in 9 months when it’s due for extension)

Corporate Malware : the good, the bad & the ugly

The good : Askimet & Greylisting for the win
Today this blog passed the 1k milestone of blocked spam attempts! The positive news is that Askimet has proven itself THE defense against comment spamming. The negative side is that there have been more than 1000 attempts to fill this website with spam…

For my email traffic I rely on Greylisting, and I must say that this had a HUGE effect on clearing spam from my Inbox. In the past we relied on Spam Assasin to do this for us, but Greylisting has proven itself beyond the (out-of-the-box) Spam Assasin results. Many “gurus” proclaim that you have to setup several tiers of Spam filtering, yet I still prefer the KISS-principle when results only differ by a few percentages.

The bad : But then again