Everyone becomes a spammer

Lily white since 2000. Maybe I haven't been at it long enough, eh?

I have been at it since 1995 and am still white. I must admit a few years ago adding misspellings in white text for about 3 weeks. After everyone said it was neat, I then got bored with it and took it out.

Nobody was looking for misspellings of Edinburgh councillors names anyway.

..."white" in Dutch - hehe. I show the odd streak of orange though (will spam subtly for fun). I'm not a commercial player anyway.

Could happen later though... I'll make a mental sticky note to check hat colour once and again.

another one...

...the Edinburgh councillors names misspellings one, for their names are probably misspellings by default. (Sorry about that, couldn't resist)

Please post a couple of examples.

There was a time, long ago, when I thought it would be helpful to my then-employer to put their main competitor's name in the meta keywords tag. It accomplished nothing.

Does that make me a junior level evil-doer, or do I still need to sacrifice my first born to Syloson, God of Cloaking?

Now their misdeeds far outweigh any misspellings. But Nick doesn't allow any politics.

No, my comment wasn't directed at you, but the premise of this thread.

If anything, I think that SEOs tend to more often go the other way. Push the envelope a bit at first (or a lot at first) and then realize that it's just not necessary. They get whiter, and whiter and whiter...

I love when I hear or read stuff from people who I used to think were "spammers" basically saying the same things we've been saying for years about building great sites. I think that anyone in the game for a long time realizes that the key is to look for long-term success. (Assuming we're talking about real business websites, not viagra, etc.)

>Real web sites

I think that is the key. People who make sites to make money may eventually turn to spam. They often don't make "real websites" and are web technicians rather than content providers. This is potentially very lucrative so Jill's comments seem to me to be broad generalizations.

People with bricks and mortar who use the web to promote it are less likely to do tricks because their main target is just to rank well for their target market. Why would they risk that with spam?

Someone out there is creating the spam stuff.....and the people who are doing it definitely aren't the newbies. What happened after the Florida update etc, people thought I used to be white and I can't pay the bills.

I always go back to the simple point here, the big seo people who have been in the industry for a long time, now have two hats. One is for the real brand name sites they run, this is nearly white. The the disposable sites they run are all black sites, goto the pub and hit button, autogenerate 1000-1000000 pages, autogenerate 1-100000 million links, come back from pub and watch traffic come in. Even if they only last for an hour or two in the search results bottom feeding, they pay for the lunch. Come back from pub and hit button again, go back to the pub.

Even put adsense on the sites, google will love you, if you get really good at it they will send you presents:)

Search any of the seo forums for "button pshing" and you will see the interest.

As I said before someone is doing it, because everything I look for has these sites in all the search engine results.

DougS

The thing I hate about discussions like these is that it does nothing but divide people. It has gotten to the point that it is like starting a discussion on religion.

I am sick of hearing about discussions about supposed seo ethics and/ or hat colors. This topic has been rehashed so much that I am honestly surprised anyone spends any time on it at all.

We are all professionals here. Let's agree to disagree on methodology and move on to topics that are actually important to the industry.

I've been thinking along similar lines grnidone, if anyone wants to make a suggestion as to how we should, or should not handle that, be my guest...

Sorry. Couldn't help myself.

Actually, I do think that the discussion (as long as it's just a discussion) of ethics, hat color, what have you, has a place, just not here. It's the sort of thing to hash out around people who are new to the business, who are looking for a direction in which to move forward.

But around here, we all know what we believe already. There's no point in arguing about something if there's absolutely no chance of convincing anyone you're right.

We've just had a big thread on ethics, a massive one. Im simply thinking that we might be a little stricter in how often we rake up the same old arguments?

No crime of DougS to post this one, and certainly no offence intended - as far as these things go, it's a pretty good fight starter :)

Maybe it would be best just to keep these things limited to discussions of other posts/papers/articles though? The last one was an absolute cracker, and i don't want to not talk about this stuff, just maybe not so much...

lemme know what you think..

qwerty, you edited your post to include more :)

Well said, i think that's a far more eloquent way of putting what i was rather ham-fistedly trying to communicate heh..

I actually just wondered when everyone turned. I didn't think there were any "white hats" (sorry about the term) left and wondered what it was that made people turn.

This was what I wanted the thread to be about.....ie why did people become "unclean"

DougS

That's the whole point, Doug.

You're assuming that people are 'unclean' or 'clean' because of how they do business.

These discussions about "You do this and that is unclean, or wrong, or white hat or black hat" just divides people and helps nobody.

Frankly, this topic amongst SEO circles has gotten to a point that it is like starting a discussion that one religion is better than another.

Please understand that it is not your post that set me off, but years of watching people rehash and rehash and argue over this topic. What floors me is that nobody sees how judgemental and belittling it is to everyone involved and the industry as a whole.

It's like new form of racism for SEO's. (OK, Mivox, Classism if there is such a word.)

People do business in different ways. Different is just different. It is not bad, good, clean or unclean. It just is.

You're right-handed. I'm Left-handed. Ta-MAY-toe, Ta-MAH-toe.

In the end, it doesn't matter.

each person does what heesh feels comfortable with doing - in order to support hisser way of life or beliefs or habits good or bad.

I personally don't care what any of you wear as to hat color: almost all of you have valuable information, gem-quality insights. I learn something new daily, and sometimes something priceless. I hate to see this sort of thing degenerate into meaningless wrangles over "who's what and what flavor today".

[And no, I'm not going to go into ANY "ethical or otherwise" posting here or anywhere.... that's all too personal to each individual.]

Grnidone

I agree whole heartedly with you here, maybe I have written this wrong. The issue I was trying to raise was if you have chnaged your business model and now do more and more tricks, then what was the reason for doing it?

DougS

I lost some rankings and decided I'd hedge my bets.
I build some sites for short term gain and others for long haul.
The decision was made because I needed to pay the bills.
I know which way I’d like the industry to go, but no matter what happens I’m not going to try a buck the entire industry direction.
As much as I might want IE to lose market share my sites are still built for IE.

I don't think debates like this are specific to the SEO industry (although our obsession with hat colours is a little weird), it is just that this industry is only now reaching a level of maturity where peoples income/lives hinge around the market and webmasters have been doing their version of work long enough to not want to change.
To me we just sound like the debate on union or non-union labour or outsourcing jobs to China.
These too are quasi ethical debates which effect the live/incomes of industry peers.

I view the debates as being part of our human nature and representative of a maturing industry. I think it is healthily to discuss just not healthy to repeat the same arguments.