How SEOs Screw It Up For Everyone
Sunday, February 17th, 2008Received this from the Stompernet guys recently:
“Pure Evil: 10 More Devious Ranking Tips for Video + Social Marketing”
I’ve learn’t a lot from Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon. Their original “Stomping the Search Engines” course was a good guide to the fundamentals of SEO and despite being very successful at their own online businesses they maintained an ethical standard which I respected. I never joined their Stompernet membership site because of the high cost but as a subscriber I have taken in a lot of their tips and free videos. Up until now, it’s all been good.
But, I was very disappointed to read this latest mailing, which is all about getting links from social bookmarking sites. Actually, the article is to promote a coaching program from a guy called Jeff Johnson, who Stompernet are now apparently affiliated with.
Now, creating links via social bookmarking sites is quite legitimate as long you do it the right way. But here’s what Stompernet say:
“Register multiple accounts for each of the Social Bookmarking sites listed at SocialMarker.com. We suggest starting out with at least 10 unique accounts for each Social Bookmarking (SB) site.”
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! Creating multiple accounts is abuse, pure and simple.
They go on…
“For example, you should have made 10 propeller.com accounts in the last step. For any given item you are bookmarking, randomly choose 3 of those accounts to submit your item to. The next time you bookmark an item, randomly choose 3 more”
For starters, this is not social marketing as the title of this mailing suggests. It’s black-hat link building. It also shows a complete misunderstanding of what a “bookmarking” site is. Propeller is not a bookmarking site in the same manner as del.iciou.us or Furl. It is a social media site where users submit stories such as blog posts (not just bookmarks) which are then voted on by the community.
Users of sites like Propeller are very sensitive to spam and they can spot it a mile off. If you create an account at Propeller for no other reason than to promote your own content the users will sooner or later sniff you out and mark you as a spammer. To avoid that you HAVE to become a trusted member of the community by active participation - submitting, voting and commenting on other user’s submissions. Done correctly, i.e. not trying to game them but rather use them in the manner they were intended, you will be flat out maintaining one account.
And the Stompernet guys want you to create 10 accounts or more?
It’s abuse, it’s spam, and it’s why social media sites HATE marketers and SEOs. It puts their defences up and makes it harder for legitimate social marketers who do the right thing and play by the rules. Creating multiple accounts is AGAINST the rules and if you take the trouble to learn how social media sites work, and work WITH them and not against them, you can still reap the benefits.
And this…
“If you’re promoting a page/post/video about Jessica Alba (for example) - you should ALSO Social Bookmark items you find about her from various other sites as well (YouTube, MySpace, Digg, etc.) that are NOT the pages you’re promoting. This will help create that “natural” appearance we are striving for.”
Instead of creating a phoney “natural appearance”, why not just BE natural? Create a great blog post about Jessica Alba. Make it controversial or confronting and people will want to link to it. You won’t need multiple accounts.
And this…
“If you are not natural when you do this, it’s going to look like spam - because, it IS spam if you abuse it. Please understand that there is a fine line between power techniques like this and outright abuse - don’t abuse this tip! Do it the right way.”
Sorry Andy, these aren’t “power techniques”. They’re abuse. They’re deception. And that’s never a good long term strategy. You crossed that “fine line” ages ago. You mightn’t see it that way, or other marketers mightn’t see it that way, but just ask the creators and users of the social media sites you’ve party-crashed into. And once you’ve been banned it’s extremely hard to get back in, unless you go skulking around with proxy IPs and the like. Who wants to be bothered with that? When you’re banned it isn’t just your throw away email address that gets banned, it’s your IP address.
Andy Jenkins is a smart guy. I’ve watched his videos and learnt a lot. If you believe his claims, and I have no reason not to, he runs multi-million dollar online business. But if you’re a Stompernet subscriber, please, don’t follow this advice. It’s yet another example of what happens when big-time Internet Marketers/SEOs discover social media/bookmarking. They just screw it up for the rest of us!
If you want to learn how to do it the right way, Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking is where you’ll find the answers.
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