4 ms·

I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money. They drew up an inf

I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money. They drew up an info graphic that you thought was entertaining. In exchange you show your friends by linking that site. This is no different than any other type of link bait, be it an inflammatory article or some sort of interactive map you would see on the New Your Times website. Spam is different. Spam is junk blog comments with a link to another website. Those comments bring no value and diminish the value of the site. You would never link to one of those comments to show your friends like you link to these info graphics.

tptacek 16y ago
Not complicated! They are asking you to repay the favor of creating the infographic by lying to Google and claiming that a site that paid them is the best resource on the internet for mesothelioma or college textbooks or whatnot.
- vinhboy 16y ago
  This is no different than a startup paying an SEO company. In the end, both places researched and surfaced something that the end user will find interesting. I dont see anything wrong with that. I think it's Google's job to decide what is relevant or not in the search result. Personally for me, I am waiting for the day when Google decides to de-list sites like eHow. PS. sorry mattmiller, I accidently down-arrowed you, and I can't undo it. I meant to up-arrow you.
  - mattmiller 16y ago
    I don't think Google will do that. I think one of two things will happen: -A lot of smaller vertical search sites will pop up. MedicalInfoSearch.com will not show entertainment or economics info, and its ranking will not be based on backlinks from entertainment or economics sites. I think we are seeing the beginnings of this with Blekko. -Or, and I say this at the risk of sounding like one of those social media people, the link graph will start to give more and more weight to Facebook Likes and link sharing and twitter sharing and any future social network sharing. If you think about it, this was the reason Google went with the backlink strategy to begin with. Back then they had no social networks, so they only way someone could vote for a site was by putting a link to it on their website. If you did not have a website you did not get a vote. Now almost everyone has the capacity to vote on a websites quality, but for some reason only website owners are allowed to. Social networks love info graphics, in this future you are going to see a lot of them.
    - notahacker 16y ago
      trouble with the social graph is that it's even easier to game. Click "like" to reveal discount code offer...
- mattmiller 16y ago
  I see what you mean, but I would call that moderately unethical. The reality is there are probably less than 5 legitimate mesothelioma websites (FDA, Wikipedia, maybe some charities...) and the rest are all junk put up to get ad-sense dollars and leads for lawyers. Every single one of the hundreds of thousands of other sites is doing much less ethical link building.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Torches and pitchforks: no. Flag with extreme prejudice: yes.
- patio11 16y ago
  Is this distinguishable from a startup creating OSS, which will cause people to "lie to Google" when citing the OSS, and if so how? (I happen to know two reasons how: they're much, much cheaper to crank out at scale than OSS is, and they're typically backed by an outsourced promotion team. These do not strike me as having ethical significance.) Are we maybe leading with our geek brains here? The geek brain that maybe isn't quite 100% onboard with "it is ethical to attempt to market $FILL_IN_BLANK , even in ways which are effective"? Edited to add: I do not often ask myself, after typing in A HREF, "Am I being true in my thoughts and deeds to my primary reason for all linking activity, which is to preserve the sanctity of Google's link graph?" Should I? Really?
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Who creates OSS and uses it to market "scholarships" for online colleges by scrambling Google's notion of what the best site for online colleges is? SEO schemes that get people to cite your OSS to improve your OSS's position: just peachy. SEO schemes that get people to cite your OSS to improve someone's IRS settlement site: not OK.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - rmc 16y ago
      I believe patio11 did something similar. Made an A/B testing framework to sell bingo cards. He advises doing this http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ I think it's a brilliant idea and plan to copy it (y'know sometime...)
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Are you promoting IRS payment sites, structured settlements, mesothelioma suits, online colleges or college loans? No? Then go with my blessing!
_delirium 16y ago
When it's possible to make it a business model like this, churned out on a routine basis, it makes me think it's more exploiting a sort of brain-hack than providing useful services. They've found a formula for baiting digg/reddit/etc. users into clicking on chartjunk, and are selling that formula to anyone who will pay: if your college-textbooks site needs some SEO, we'll whip up an infographic about bottled water that you can get linked everywhere. Because we want to inform people about bottled water, are doing serious research on the subject to present a well-thought-out position, because it's even relevant to your site at all, etc.? No, just because it gets clicks, and we'll decide what to put in the chart 100% based on what will get the most clicks, not based on what is actually true about bottled water or anything (I imagine they don't go out of their way to make up stuff, but clearly an interest in bottled water is not their motivator). I agree that linkbait in general has many of those features, but I'd consider most linkbait to be at least a cousin of spam. This is somewhat notable just because it's so openly cynical about it.
- jaybol 16y ago
  I think you have touched on something here. As you mentioned as well, what ultimately frustrated the individual who posted IAMA, is not that the content was hastily put together or is even inaccurate, in fact it was very carefully crafted with the intention of being interesting. As such, infographics have become a viable medium that people like and share, and the sum of the message/information is easily shareable on blogs (which is why most on the web are long and skinny)...most people wouldn't grab an entire article to repost on their tumblr or whatever, but a whole graphic looks cool on their site. Like you mentioned, this is the simple formula, but in itself isn't malicious anymore than realizing that people like big photos and funny videos and link to controversial/inciteful headlines. That said, these campaigns have been tremendously successful even using completely irrelevant topics to gain links back to sites for very important keywords, and the content is not showing them to be an authority in their niche, be it financial or insurance or travel or gambling...they have shown that they can attract attention very well, that they are VERY good at SEO, and that they can (some of the time at least) design decent looking content. I do agree with the individual answering the IAMA that it is an example of the internet being broken, and I found myself wondering if/hoping that somehow Matt Cutts would have a dream that would allow him to teach the Google bots to crawl a .png file to determine if the content in the graphic was relevant to the term in the links (or hello, at least the freaking title?). I am a co-founder of a company that creates infographics along with written content as part of an overall social media strategy and we spend a great deal of time finding the balance for each client between content that has mass appeal and content that relates to their core customer base/readership. You have to bring in new people somehow, but as many people have learned, irrelevant content doesn't convert, which is why so many people either craft content with no intention of converting and simply say 'social media traffic doesn't convert' or rank sites to sell them to someone who knows how to monetize them down the road (assuming these SEO rankings hold up). Finally though - if it builds a site's reputation for being a relevant resource for interesting and useful content that does do the job of educating, it is ok if it looks pretty and does it with chart junk no matter how many purists out there say they would rather just pop open the .csv
ergo98 16y ago
"I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money." They're doing so dishonestly. Dishonesty on the tubes is why so many of us are jaded and believe nothing. Few of the examples said "Here's a professional infographic pandering to the current pop meme, surrounded by some monetizing ads", but instead it was "HERE IS MY FIRST INFOGRAPHIC!" (always ad free because that's a part of the bait-and-switch meme approach), and once it got boosted the URL turned to a 301 permanent PageRank forward to some spam factory, polluting search engines with garbage. Meme herding itself is really the root cause, though: Once Digg showed a propensity for top N lists, the web became awash with vapid top N lists for everything, humorlessly produced by SEO drones. Not all content follows this shallow, deceptive practice. There is a dating site -- I honestly can't remember which one right now, and am not suppressing their name on purpose -- that keeps releasing compelling analysis data, predictably boosting them to the tops of all of the social news sites. In return for producing interesting content, they get lots of incoming hits and page rank goodness. Their motives are clear as day for everyone, and there is no surreptitious BS. Sidenote: 99% of infographics are terrible.
- Malus 16y ago
  The dating site is OkCupid (http://www.okcupid.com/ http://www.okcupid.com/) and their data analysis can be found on OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/).

tptacek 16y ago

Not complicated! They are asking you to repay the favor of creating the infographic by lying to Google and claiming that a site that paid them is the best resource on the internet for mesothelioma or college textbooks or whatnot.

vinhboy 16y ago
This is no different than a startup paying an SEO company. In the end, both places researched and surfaced something that the end user will find interesting. I dont see anything wrong with that. I think it's Google's job to decide what is relevant or not in the search result. Personally for me, I am waiting for the day when Google decides to de-list sites like eHow. PS. sorry mattmiller, I accidently down-arrowed you, and I can't undo it. I meant to up-arrow you.
- mattmiller 16y ago
  I don't think Google will do that. I think one of two things will happen: -A lot of smaller vertical search sites will pop up. MedicalInfoSearch.com will not show entertainment or economics info, and its ranking will not be based on backlinks from entertainment or economics sites. I think we are seeing the beginnings of this with Blekko. -Or, and I say this at the risk of sounding like one of those social media people, the link graph will start to give more and more weight to Facebook Likes and link sharing and twitter sharing and any future social network sharing. If you think about it, this was the reason Google went with the backlink strategy to begin with. Back then they had no social networks, so they only way someone could vote for a site was by putting a link to it on their website. If you did not have a website you did not get a vote. Now almost everyone has the capacity to vote on a websites quality, but for some reason only website owners are allowed to. Social networks love info graphics, in this future you are going to see a lot of them.
  - notahacker 16y ago
    trouble with the social graph is that it's even easier to game. Click "like" to reveal discount code offer...
mattmiller 16y ago
I see what you mean, but I would call that moderately unethical. The reality is there are probably less than 5 legitimate mesothelioma websites (FDA, Wikipedia, maybe some charities...) and the rest are all junk put up to get ad-sense dollars and leads for lawyers. Every single one of the hundreds of thousands of other sites is doing much less ethical link building.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Torches and pitchforks: no. Flag with extreme prejudice: yes.
patio11 16y ago
Is this distinguishable from a startup creating OSS, which will cause people to "lie to Google" when citing the OSS, and if so how? (I happen to know two reasons how: they're much, much cheaper to crank out at scale than OSS is, and they're typically backed by an outsourced promotion team. These do not strike me as having ethical significance.) Are we maybe leading with our geek brains here? The geek brain that maybe isn't quite 100% onboard with "it is ethical to attempt to market $FILL_IN_BLANK , even in ways which are effective"? Edited to add: I do not often ask myself, after typing in A HREF, "Am I being true in my thoughts and deeds to my primary reason for all linking activity, which is to preserve the sanctity of Google's link graph?" Should I? Really?
- tptacek 16y ago
  Who creates OSS and uses it to market "scholarships" for online colleges by scrambling Google's notion of what the best site for online colleges is? SEO schemes that get people to cite your OSS to improve your OSS's position: just peachy. SEO schemes that get people to cite your OSS to improve someone's IRS settlement site: not OK.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - rmc 16y ago
    I believe patio11 did something similar. Made an A/B testing framework to sell bingo cards. He advises doing this http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/ I think it's a brilliant idea and plan to copy it (y'know sometime...)
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Are you promoting IRS payment sites, structured settlements, mesothelioma suits, online colleges or college loans? No? Then go with my blessing!

_delirium 16y ago

When it's possible to make it a business model like this, churned out on a routine basis, it makes me think it's more exploiting a sort of brain-hack than providing useful services. They've found a formula for baiting digg/reddit/etc. users into clicking on chartjunk, and are selling that formula to anyone who will pay: if your college-textbooks site needs some SEO, we'll whip up an infographic about bottled water that you can get linked everywhere. Because we want to inform people about bottled water, are doing serious research on the subject to present a well-thought-out position, because it's even relevant to your site at all, etc.? No, just because it gets clicks, and we'll decide what to put in the chart 100% based on what will get the most clicks, not based on what is actually true about bottled water or anything (I imagine they don't go out of their way to make up stuff, but clearly an interest in bottled water is not their motivator). I agree that linkbait in general has many of those features, but I'd consider most linkbait to be at least a cousin of spam. This is somewhat notable just because it's so openly cynical about it.

jaybol 16y ago
I think you have touched on something here. As you mentioned as well, what ultimately frustrated the individual who posted IAMA, is not that the content was hastily put together or is even inaccurate, in fact it was very carefully crafted with the intention of being interesting. As such, infographics have become a viable medium that people like and share, and the sum of the message/information is easily shareable on blogs (which is why most on the web are long and skinny)...most people wouldn't grab an entire article to repost on their tumblr or whatever, but a whole graphic looks cool on their site. Like you mentioned, this is the simple formula, but in itself isn't malicious anymore than realizing that people like big photos and funny videos and link to controversial/inciteful headlines. That said, these campaigns have been tremendously successful even using completely irrelevant topics to gain links back to sites for very important keywords, and the content is not showing them to be an authority in their niche, be it financial or insurance or travel or gambling...they have shown that they can attract attention very well, that they are VERY good at SEO, and that they can (some of the time at least) design decent looking content. I do agree with the individual answering the IAMA that it is an example of the internet being broken, and I found myself wondering if/hoping that somehow Matt Cutts would have a dream that would allow him to teach the Google bots to crawl a .png file to determine if the content in the graphic was relevant to the term in the links (or hello, at least the freaking title?). I am a co-founder of a company that creates infographics along with written content as part of an overall social media strategy and we spend a great deal of time finding the balance for each client between content that has mass appeal and content that relates to their core customer base/readership. You have to bring in new people somehow, but as many people have learned, irrelevant content doesn't convert, which is why so many people either craft content with no intention of converting and simply say 'social media traffic doesn't convert' or rank sites to sell them to someone who knows how to monetize them down the road (assuming these SEO rankings hold up). Finally though - if it builds a site's reputation for being a relevant resource for interesting and useful content that does do the job of educating, it is ok if it looks pretty and does it with chart junk no matter how many purists out there say they would rather just pop open the .csv

ergo98 16y ago

"I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money." They're doing so dishonestly. Dishonesty on the tubes is why so many of us are jaded and believe nothing. Few of the examples said "Here's a professional infographic pandering to the current pop meme, surrounded by some monetizing ads", but instead it was "HERE IS MY FIRST INFOGRAPHIC!" (always ad free because that's a part of the bait-and-switch meme approach), and once it got boosted the URL turned to a 301 permanent PageRank forward to some spam factory, polluting search engines with garbage. Meme herding itself is really the root cause, though: Once Digg showed a propensity for top N lists, the web became awash with vapid top N lists for everything, humorlessly produced by SEO drones. Not all content follows this shallow, deceptive practice. There is a dating site -- I honestly can't remember which one right now, and am not suppressing their name on purpose -- that keeps releasing compelling analysis data, predictably boosting them to the tops of all of the social news sites. In return for producing interesting content, they get lots of incoming hits and page rank goodness. Their motives are clear as day for everyone, and there is no surreptitious BS. Sidenote: 99% of infographics are terrible.

Malus 16y ago
The dating site is OkCupid (http://www.okcupid.com/ http://www.okcupid.com/) and their data analysis can be found on OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/).