Double Standards for Spam

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve really been trying to keep things a little more positive here but every so often something gets under my skin and I gotta call a spade a spade. I’ll start off by saying I’m a regular reader of Darren Rowse’s Problogger and I respect and value his work there. Darren’s on vacation and having some guest bloggers write columns for him. Yesterday I noticed this post Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days. After reading it I wrinkled my nose a bit but let it slide. Later I noticed it had made it’s way to digg and was tagged by people in Del.icio.us and to be honest the way people were tripping over themselves to fawn over this was actually completly ridiculous. To prove my point lets take a look at the three suggestions:

First, I made the most of Technorati tags.  I tagged every key word in each of my posts.

I placed a few FeedBurner headline animator blocks on some of my most popular pages and after a day or so I noticed a significant increase in traffic for 5 minutes worth of work on my part.

I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it.

Nothing revolutionary here, in fact people have been calling this sort of aggressive behavior as spam, and labeling the people who do it are the scourge of the internet. Why is this suddenly acceptable behavior? Does anyone have a problem if I do it for one of my sites? What if the site in question wasn’t about computers, but was about viagra, cialis, mortgages, poker, or pay day loans? Is this still acceptable? Would over 100 people have thought me saying it was worthy of a bookmark in delicious?

Now to be clear I have absolutely no problem with any and all of these tactics, what gets my feathers ruffled is why the unwashed masses are now OK with it.

Sphere It

3 Responses to “Double Standards for Spam”

1. Cameron Olthuis Says:
   January 3rd, 2006 at 3:47 am

   I don’t see who this is considered spam unless it’s abused in a spammy way.

   If he’s leaving thoughtful comments/trackbacks that are relevant to the blog entries then I don’t think it’s considered spam. It would be considered spam if he was blatantly trying to promote his blog or a product.

   For example: If he were to leave comments saying…

   “Check out my blog [URL] it talk about the same thing”

   Or a more common one that I often see…

   “I noticed your post was about playing poker, well I’ve just launched this brand new online poker company so check it out”

   Unless the blogger is asking for a place he can play poker that comment wouldn’t be acceptable.

   Just my opinion! Does it make sense??

2. Skills to pay the bills Says:
   February 25th, 2006 at 12:43 am

   ShoeMoney SEM/SEO contest worth over $25,000.00

   I have always wanted to host a SEO/SEM contest but I wanted to do something original… different… Now Don’t get me wrong, I love what seologs.com and v7n have put together AND I have donated to each, but I wanted to try a new approach….

3. dondor Says:
   October 21st, 2006 at 5:14 pm

   I have to agree with Cameron about the spam policy, Many people are using comments / trackbacks as a source for links, but I believe it is ok, as long as they keep it in the post subject and not just say “hello nice blog” and leave their link there, but in any case that’s why there’s comment moderation and even members only comments.