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No, I Won't Link to Your Spammy Article
- zerm778 7y agoYoU ArE SuCh A gReAT HuMaIN!
- teddyuk 7y agoHe just comes across as an arsehole, this sort of nonsense has stopped me listening to whatever else he has to say. What we all do with spam is ignore it.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago> What we all do with spam is ignore it. There are two kinds of people: those who ignore it and those who fight it. The former can afford it because of the efforts of the latter.
- barnabee 7y agoNo, he doesn’t, he comes across as someone who is helping by trying to react to a serious problem in a way that, if we all did it, might go some way to solving it. I wish everyone would/could do something like this. If you send me an unsolicited email you/your company goes on an avoid list and it would take a very strong, very personal recommendation for me to work with you after that. Unsolicited email is targeted (or in some cases, pretty untargeted) advertising. It’s unprofessional, unpleasant and a hassle, and should be called out and heavily penalised whenever possible.
- chongli 7y agoif we all did it, might go some way to solving it That's kind of the history of all the problems facing humanity, isn't it? If we could work together, we would solve all of them. But we don't. We have this complicated mixture of self-interested behaviour and collective policing via laws and social norms but it always seems like self-interested behaviour wins out in the end. Dedicated individuals will always find the cracks in the dam.
- zdkl 7y agoAnd how would I go about contacting you in a professional, pleasant and unhassling way if I genuinely have good reason to reach out and we have no prior connection? What I hear from your conclusion is "screw anyone who isn't already in my network", and that sounds... sad?
- jlgaddis 7y agoIf you "genuinely have good reason to reach out and we have no prior connection", that's fine and 99% of folks aren't going to consider that spam. Ultimately, it really comes down to the intent.
- Kaiyou 7y agoWhat would a genuinely good reason even be?
- barnabee 7y agoIf only people with a genuinely good reason made contact it’d be a lot easier. If someone has a such a reason then they ought to be able to explain it well enough in an email, and given that the process of avoidance isn’t automated, it’s more than likely going to get seen. Collaborations and discussions are always welcome and it’s not hard to get in touch with me, it’s generally very easy to separate this from the spam. Twitter is a better place than email to kick off a non-spammy relationship with someone you don’t know. That said, half of the people who send this spam think they have a genuinely good reason and I have no doubt some of them even believe it. 99% of the time there isn’t a good reason, they are after something. “I saw you do after X and we provide Y which is necessary for X” is not a good reason. For instance, even if I’m hiring, unsolicited contact from recruiters who think they can fill that role is entirely unwelcome, etc. I can count on one hand the number of fruitful outcomes from completely cold contact that I’ve experienced in >15 years.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoSomeone has upset troy today.
- maallooc 7y agoWow, I hope I have self-esteem like him to react to a simple mass-produced spam like this.
- gkoberger 7y agoHe's not really writing it for the bots emailing him, he's saying "this SEO growth tactic sucks, marketers should stop it!" in a creative way.
- onion2k 7y agoI understand where Troy is coming from, and I agree with his point of view, but how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust? Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. When I got random emails they tended to be a bit less obvious than the brash "I think this would be good for your blog" and more "If you like this please link back.", but the fact that commercial SEO has ruined the process entirely is just so depressing.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago> Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. Man, that was really a long time ago.
- dylz 7y agoI doubt he would mind linking to an actual, good article that was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. Based on the list of titles, they are all literal blog spam - worthless, useless trash that contributes nothing other than absolute rubbish on the internet, largely affiliate links, fraudulent VPN reviews for whoever is the highest bidder, etc.
- mirimir 7y agoYeah, if I wasn't already overwhelmed by stuff to be depressed about, this would be just the thing to push me over the edge. But as it is, this ship sailed a couple decades ago.
- nikanj 7y agoBack then, those emails weren't clearly spammed to a pre-purchased list of "key industry influencer".
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust? You've answered it yourself. The web got commercialized. What was once a larger community became pockets of small communities desperately trying to hide from the cancer that is marketing, which has eaten most of the Web.
- osobo 7y agoNo, I won't read this low effort blog post.
- TheDesolate0 7y agoThen why is this spam here?
- lolc 7y agoOne of us solicited it!
- apatters 7y agoThe concept is interesting, that he thinks he can penalize spammers by A) having a popular blog and B) shaming them. In general I agree that hiring a bunch of digital marketers who go out and ask hundreds or thousands of sites to link to a blog post is not really a productive sector of the economy. I think most marketing is an unproductive sector of the economy. But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win. Maybe there is something to Troy's idea of "if you shout too many times and too loudly I will shame you." Wouldn't it be a better world if most business growth happened through organic customer referrals, as opposed to paid marketing?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win. That isn't really necessary, it's just a zero-sum game the economy is stuck in. A world of good could be done by enlightened regulators, if they would start curtailing the worst aspects of marketing and advertising space. In today's world, you need a megaphone to have even a tiny chance of being heard in a space where everyone else is already shouting through megaphones of their own. If someone could step in and take everyone's megaphones away, maybe then we'd have a chance at having a conversation.
- airnomad 7y agoA guy from a company with probably the worst history of unethical or even illegal behavior in the industry, got all worked up about guys doing link building outreach.
- gumby 7y agoHe is unethical?
- mattmein 7y agoI wouldn't classify those emails as spam, as spam is unsolicited bulk email, ie untargeted emails going out to a large amount of people. Personalised unsolicited email or any other type of contact can be an important way to make new connections, at least in my opinion.
- gumby 7y agoThey’re asking the blog owner to create SEO spam.
- Deimorz 7y agoI get at least 3 or 4 of these emails a week, and my site is a user-generated one along the same lines as HN or Reddit. They link to some thread vaguely related to a topic (e.g. VPNs, pets, gardening), usually compliment me on that "article", and ask me to publish their article on the subject too. These aren't genuine requests. They're sending them to sites like mine where the request doesn't even make sense--the site isn't a blog, all they'd have to do is register and they could post any article themselves (I'd ban them immediately, but they could do it). They're absolutely spam, and once you see a few of them you realize how formulaic they all are. There must be some tool that generates them, they usually just have some minor differences in words/phrasing (basically "spinning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning).
- jlgaddis 7y agoFor many of us, the fact that it is "unsolicited" means it is spam. I really don't care if it was an e-mail sent out to 1000 random people or it was "targeted" to 20 people just like me. If it's commercial and unsolicited, it's spam and I will treat it as such.
- pmlnr 7y agoIt is spam. I get them as well. It's annoying.
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- janpot 7y agoTotally get it. I wonder if diluting his page with irrelevant titles is going to have a negative effect on his own ranking.
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- alkotronikk 7y agoI've heard about it. It's actually a SEO "strategy" called link building. You just spam sites with articles related to you, asking for a link to your page, which in return raises your credibility in search results and yields better position... in theory.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoYup, and they have to do it like that because spamming links in comments no longer works because most commenting systems add a meta tag to the links so that search engines won't follow / consider them for ranking.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAlso, blog comment systems these days often feature automated spam filters. (Or petty bored admins like me; back in the days I had a wordpress blog, I once looked at the spam links I was bombarded with, identified the SEO company responsible, then went around them and mailed a customer of theirs, informing them of how their business is being promoted. It ended up with that customer dumping their SEO provider, which I found immensely satisfying.)
- templain 7y agoWow chinese spammers are living rent free in your head dude, how about not responding at all?
- Rallerbabs 7y agoI'm an SEO. I build links all the time. SEOs like me don't give a rat's patoot if some guy throws a hissyfit about other SEOs contacting him for backlinks. Whenever I do outreach, people reply with a quote on how much it costs. This is business, and I'm willing to pay. I agree with him that those wanting a backlink for free are parasite moochers. But the reality of the situation is that you can build great content and nobody will ever visit it if you don't build at least a few backlinks to yourself. Build it and they will come? Show me where, because it's certainly not in SEO. I still gotta eat. So paid backlinks it is. Troy can execute his evil plan. It'll fail. You think you're gonna get rankings & traffic from just including a few terms on an otherwise unrelated blogpost? It isn't 2005 in SEO anymore. If only it were!