Tagged: spam

Nov 23

Google Bans Misleading and Spam Ads

I’m sure you’ve seen those teeth whitening or flat stomach weight loss ads on google advertising– they are everywhere. However, thanks to Google’s new initiative to ban any advertising that sells misleading products or could be considered as spam advertising, these types of ads will soon be a distant memory.  Hopefully now we will no longer have to see a flabby stomach on our sidebar as we’re reading a blog or yellow teeth asking us if we have the same!

A great explanation and summary of the new policy can be found at The Big Money: Google Does Non-Evil Thing: Bans White Teeth, Flat Stomachs.

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Posted in PPC, Search Engines

Jul 27

How The Death of Twitter Spammers Can Help Your Business

For those who keep up with Twitter news, you couldn’t have missed the big news last week that Twitter was attempting to kill off all spam accounts on their website.

Twitter spam was getting out of control, and even though many users experienced heavy drops in the number of their followers because false accounts were being deleted, this can only have a positive impact on your business.

Once Twitter has mostly gotten rid of spam accounts, then you will have a more accurate picture of the genuine people are that are actually following you. For example, when you are thinking about tweeting about your newest blog post to your 10,000 followers, it will reach a much lower number of people, as almost everyone has some sort of spam account following them. Once these spam accounts are removed, you will have a more accurate number of people you are reaching through your tweets.

If you follow @tless, they will automatically send you a direct message every week with your total number of new followers and a total number of people who have ‘dropped’ you (stopped following you). For my personal Twitter account last week, I had 20 or so adds and 56 ‘drops’, due to the eradication of spam accounts.

While I’m not happy with the lower follower number, I do know that this is definitely more accurate, and I applaud Twitter for their efforts to get all that nasty spam outta’ there!

NOTE: If you don’t want your business account to be labeled as spam, read this great article on What is and Isn’t Spam on Twitter on ClickZ.

NOTE’S NOTE: Follow us on twitter: The Social Robot

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Image courtesy of: http://blogs.sun.com/davetong

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Posted in Uncategorized

Jul 21

The New Generation of Splogs

Splogs, or spam + blogs, date back as far as 2003, when sites that were designed to host spam displayed nonsensical computer-generated text or text stolen from other sites. These early splogs generally contained links to affiliated Web sites. Content was often gibberish and solely for search engine purposes. Blogger defines spam blogs as those containing  “irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.” Blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have implemented measures to  identify and remove spam blogs.

The term splog is also commonly used in reference to spam in blog comments, including spings, or fraudulent  trackbacks. Both blogs and trackbacks that point to spam sites are often easy to spot due to their overtly spammy appearance. But other types of splogs aren’t so obvious.

Search for almost any topic on the Web, and you’re bound to find a blog that looks legit … and yet somehow smacks of insincerity. Blog posts containing poorly written bare-bones text and seemingly disingenuous endorsements of various sites and services are popping up all over the Internet. Is this the new generation of splogs?

Blogs that appear to be helmed by actual humans, often focus on a particular niche, and link to a variety of sites rather than one single site can much more easily bypass the anti-spamming measures taken by sites such as Blogger and WordPress.  While comment spam and overtly bogus blogs may be easy to spot and report to blogging platforms, these newer types of splogs are more dubious.  They may contain a user profile and the content may be unique, but clearly written to benefit the target sites, whether or not they are affiliated with the blog in question.

With sploggers continuing to find ways around anti-spamming efforts, are legitimate bloggers forced to live with the consequences? Is the blogosphere destined to compete with the splogosphere forever, despite the best efforts of those committed to preserving the integrity of the Web?

Image courtesy of: http://informedvoters.files.wordpress.com

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Posted in Et cetera, Featured