liamvictor's Profile

I can fully understand her irritation with spammers when one can find users such as one I just had visit me: http://beppez.stumbleupon.com/ heavily promoting a gambling site, and many others promoting "7 day loans" etc.

SEO as spam is something that's been discussed to death in this area for years, and regretably for the majority of people doing a decent job at marketing, the bad apples & rank amateurs are making seasoned SEOs and marketeers look extremely bad, what's worse is that for as long as AdSense continue to pay them $500 a month, there's no way they are going to stop. What with the proliferation of blogs in this niche, often giving contrary and poor advice, then it's no wonder we're up s*** creek.

Within SU I've found several huge rings of spammers with presumably multiple accounts all promoting the same very poor MFA pages. Reporting the users and the sites seems to do nothing, they remain within SU, perhaps their sites are no longer promoted via the Stumble button but as I tend to surf through SU's users' pages rather than use the button I still encounter them.

Many people currently equate SEO/SEM with that sort of out and out spam and so I have to somewhat sympathise with Violethemlock. Many of the first-time spammers are also thumbing up articles on SEO as well as their "Lithium batteries" pages so the spam connection is easy to make. For many of these guys, they've got some cheap space or a blogspot domain, throw in adsense and then promote like crazy following the often spammy advice of one of the make-money-online ebook gurus they've encountered.

Violethemlock's language is inappropriate and her targets are often wide of the mark but there is way too much spam remaining with SU & other social sites and I think search marketers and SEOs would do better to help remove the pure spam leaches and help educate those "marketeers" who think spamming all the social sites with each and every link on their MFAs is a good thing.

Quite how that reporting & education is done I don't know. I do know my own girlf is fed-up with the amount of "SEO" articles she finds via the stumble button having thumbed a small number up in the past that I sent her, she says the amount received far out weighs the interest she's shown in SEO. Are we polluting the gene pool too much?

I've seen friends within the social sites start to heavily promote certain sites, presumably their own, I just stop digging or thumbing those sites but perhaps I need to take a more pro-active position and ask them to change their submission tactics.

With my own sites, I just did a quick count and saw three submissions from one of my domains, all clearly identified as being mine in the review, and about a dozen submissions from another domain. Is that spam? To users like the one listed above, that's a big yes. The second domain has thousands of pages, and I've only entered in some of the very best and most popular items but even so, I too need to consider how I promote items and not to abuse the system.

As an aside, I'm frustrated that as a SU user I can't easily (if at all) see the thumbs down that don't comment for a page.