While I don't like to rehash old info, this is worth the re-post.
We've been getting such positive feedback on this webinar, I'm getting more excited about it every day. Radiant Marketing Group gave us a great mention, pretty much crystalizing the tone of what we've been hearing, which is basically that there are too many deviants out there abusing blogs for higher rankings, and that we really need to establish hard-and-fast best practices for SEO & blogs:
As you may well know, blogs are being used as a tool by blackhat SEO scam artists, which gives both business blogging and SEO a bad name.
SEO can get a bad name on its own without involving blogs, but I get livid when I think about such outfits using them in less than ethical ways. Go to Technorati and put in any number of keywords and what do you get? Spam blogs of course! Blog spam is becoming something we’re going to have to address head on, and soon. And Google is going to have to come to terms with the fact Blogger is being used as a pawn to foist this scheme upon us. (Read the whole post.)
So, while it wasn't our initial goal in producing this webinar, we're happy to contribute to any dialogue that moves our industry towards a standard of best practices.
Sign up for the webinar. It's free, and we're happy to share our views on the topic -- and to hear yours.
Hi there
Not only are blogs becomming part of the black hats bag of tricks, but also RSS, and in the future they will use other methods to circumvent search engine algorithims.
What amazes me is all three major engines are compromised by these webmasters, yet none take a proactive approach to solving the menace.
I can run a search query in most any major category and pick out the black hats 80% of the time by their use of a two letter directory after the domain URL.
How hard, or expensive would it be (I know the top 3 can afford it) to hire a team of humans to follow popular search queries manually for 10 pages, and pick out possible cloaking websites just from the URLs, forwarding them to a more specialized team for further disection??
Why do we as an industry, and consumers in general, allow ourselves to support huge profitable corporations, one in particular that has an arrogant feel to it lately, that cannot police their results?
These same top search engines then want us to give them user data, and allow their applications onto our computers....
I think if users started rejecting all the free foo foo goodies the search engines tossed at us, they might sense theres a problem.
I have yet to download one of the other toys in my own protest, I will admit I did download the Google Toolbar, however this was done well before I saw the search engines using throw aways like my bank used to toss out toasters.
Clint
Posted by: Clint Dixon | July 21, 2005 at 07:38 PM