Comments on: SEO company rep says it's illegal to link to his clients' websites

By: Jonathan Smith

Jonathan Smith — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:07:00 +0000

Such losers! This is so freaking funny. That is how the Internet works. Freedom is what we have people. Love your constitution!!

By: lafave

lafave — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 17:46:00 +0000

A mod must have deleted my previous “no” reply to this comment, which is all I thought this comment merited, but here goes. Case law please? The cited article doesn’t even come close to meeting the elements of tortious interference.

By: Peter Hague

Peter Hague — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:31:00 +0000

They claim they can stop people torrenting your stuff. That seems a bit dubious…

By: matt1shortsez

matt1shortsez — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 22:23:00 +0000

Carreon Suing

By: secretdoubleagent

secretdoubleagent — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 19:33:00 +0000

Tortuous.

By: edkedz

edkedz — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 23:28:00 +0000

Because it’s totally fair and not-at-all dickish to call some poor woman who was intimidated by scumbags (and who dares to have a blog without being an in-the-know online net geek) a “dipshit.”
Nice.

By: Jim Slinowsky

Jim Slinowsky — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Besides being a bad lawyer that dude has no clue about SEO. If the SEO company he works for told him to try and get that link removed they don’t have a clue either. That’s a great in-line link from an aged blog that actually has good content on it. If I was selling glasses I would kill for a link like that….

By: mjfgates

mjfgates — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 21:36:00 +0000

Cracker Jack prizes aren’t *that* lame.

By: Jonny Ross

Jonny Ross — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 16:09:00 +0000

This is the funniest thing i have read for a long time!! Great find and what a plonker that SEO guy is!!!! or is he doing some amazing marketing for us all to blog about it and build a link? would love to know a bit more! especially from the SEO’s client!

Jonny

By: wibbled_pig

wibbled_pig — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:46:00 +0000

my.balls

this is a test of the disqus ball linking system, if this were an actual link, you’d be able to click on my balls.

By: Peter Mead

Peter Mead — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:40:00 +0000

Yup, even if you rank on top for all the best keywords, don’t mean you gonna get the best traffic either.

Forget about getting backlinks just Good old time Pay For Traffic, from Google.

Panda and Penguin have seen to this…

Yes negative SEO is a fact!

By: Patrick5871

Patrick5871 — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 11:39:00 +0000

that’s called negative seo and that is becoming a more and more common practise, despite what google says it exists and it’s more and more common. But the real truth behind that madness, is that by getting seo out of the loop, google is encouraging businesses to buy adwords, google has become an ad engine, not a search engine anymore since most of the visible results in the fold are sponsored…

By: Patrick5871

Patrick5871 — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 11:37:00 +0000

this is called negative seo and despite what google says, it exists. Google created a monster that is out of control, penguin algorythm is a big failure, that’s just a fact ( plus results are totally absurd… impossible to find what you’re looking for, unless you click on an adword… hooo google loves adwords ;) )

By: Bom Cabedal

Bom Cabedal — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 07:31:00 +0000

Charles CARREON? That’s a pseudonym, right?

By: BBNinja

BBNinja — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 07:24:00 +0000

Ah, I see. :/

By: teapot

teapot — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 07:00:00 +0000

That happens automatically when you link to a bunch of spammy looking stuff.

By: That_Anonymous_Coward

That_Anonymous_Coward — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 04:09:00 +0000

Makes you want to run right out and do business with a company who is willing to waste money on this crap, rather than make sure their customers are getting good service…. or not.

By: Marc Mielke

Marc Mielke — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 03:50:00 +0000

Could you just be a vindictive shit and post dozens of identical messages to your own blog to screw them worse?

By: Marc Mielke

Marc Mielke — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 03:49:00 +0000

Walter White wouldn’t use legal threats. He’s a bit more… proactive when dealing with enemies.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 02:01:00 +0000

Rob and others have already pointed to the article at Talking Points Memo about how the SEO spammers who splattered lots of blog comments with their link spam back when that improved their Google Pagerank are now trying to get rid of the spam because Google’s caught on and is dinging them for it. So the link used to be positive for them, and is now negative.

But it’s a tough call, because most of this is spam that you’d like to get rid of, so having the spammer tell you where all of it is can actually be helpful. (Even better would be if you could move it all to some directory nobody looks at that’s still bad for Google Pagerank, but if Google gave out the secret to that, lots of Evil SEOs would be using that to downrank their competitors. Not that that’s a bad thing either, you understand.)

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:55:00 +0000

In this case, the Streisand Effect might help their Pagerank – by letting the blog owners know where their blog comment spam is and remove it, that might be improving their Pagerank scrore, now that Google is penalizing them for getting caught spamming blogs instead of boosting them.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:52:00 +0000

It’s not a question of technical or legal cluelessness. They have a technical clue, which is that “Obvious comment spam links are bad for our Google rating, so we should try to get rid of the comment spam links we spent years spamming people’s blog comments with back when that was good for our Google rating.” They also have a legal clue, which is “Lots of people will believe our bogus threats, which will get stuff taken down, and even the ones who don’t may figure out that the links we’re complaining about are spam and take them down, so either way we win!”

By: Susan Carley Oliver

Susan Carley Oliver — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:08:00 +0000

>>world of SEO scumbags.

Heh. I see what you did there!

By: Warren Grant

Warren Grant — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:54:00 +0000

The entire SEO industry should be considered criminal in any rate. Their whole purpose is to destroy and/or subvert the functionality of search engines.

By: nixiebunny

nixiebunny — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:48:00 +0000

Given that the link in question was posted 11 years ago as a positive endorsement of the company in question, it’s not likely to be the case that it’s intentional and malicious. The link became spoiled by Google’s ranking algorithm changes in response to SEO abuse.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:33:00 +0000

A period with almost anything on either side becomes a pseudo-link in Disqus.

By: Guido

Guido — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:15:00 +0000

Go Christine!

I am glad you are standing on your ground. These bullies need to learn, and you will teach them.

By: Funk Daddy

Funk Daddy — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:55:00 +0000

SEO is probably sandbagged as an industry, with many firms now resembling the set of Barney Miller and costuming to boot. You can sue a loser but it probably won’t make rock bottom any harder.

By: Funk Daddy

Funk Daddy — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:52:00 +0000

c’mon now, everyone knows that most meth cooks are teachers, down on their luck, probably with cancer or something, just struggling to provide for their loving families. You take that back!

By: Funk Daddy

Funk Daddy — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:46:00 +0000

I know bloggers that have comments, but don’t give a rats ass what is posted there by who for any reason and never read the comments or moderate them. They don’t blog for feedback or SEO or recognition or an audience but still blog.

But aside, stupid bloggers can’t successfully be held to account for the damage a firm does itself by engaging in spam. They may be threatened or such but why would that sort of blogger care one way or the other?

I know blogging is now far more for purposes other than the online diary/tribe that many initially used it for, but again, if you use it the way so many initially did, who the hell cares what some loser thinks of the spam they fired off so long ago?