Entries Tagged as 'SEO'

Flakelet.com reply about duplicate content

It seems I was wrong and the marketing monkeys at Flakelet.com did reply – and with an explanation on how duplicate content works and that I have nothing to worry about! I can go on my merry way copying their articles and pasting them on my site, and Google won’t care a jot – at least according to Ms. Weng Lopez. Here is what she said:

Hi Darren,

Thanks for replying. For details, you can browse the database of our articles at www.flakelet.com, where you can also learn more about how we work.

For concerns about duplicate content here are two reasons:

1. Duplicate content is an issue only when present on your own site (and that kind of duplicate content could cause some serious trouble for you). But, Google won’t punish you for reprinting other peoples’ content and they routinely index duplicate content pages, without a problem. You can easily check this by Googling a random article title from an article directory, such as EzineArticles.com. More often than not, you will find that multiple copies of the same article exist in Google’s index.

Why yes, if you search for a specific article title then you will find the sites where that article has been used. Naturally – if Google didn’t show you the sites where it had been used, it wouldn’t be of much use as a search engine. However, if I searched for phrases relating to that article I would NOT find each of those pages, all being duplicates of each other.

Google won’t punish you for copying content? I happen to think that’s about as inaccurate as you can get. Good luck with that Ms. Weng Lopez.

She continued:

2. We don’t require you to republish our articles “as is.” In fact, you can change them as much (or as little) as you wish and you will own the copyright. In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description. By adding a short 1-2 sentence introduction at the beginning, you should be more than covered.

“In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description.” …erm… no. A world of no, and once again, just in case I’ve not made myself perfectly clear, no.

Btw, we will be covering the issue of duplicate content in detail in our community, which is another good reason for joining. If you are interested, just follow this link http://flakelet.com/wp-register.php and register with the following invitation code: w4507l .

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Best regards,

Ms. Weng Lopez
weng.lopez@mikino.com
www.flakelet.com

Now I have to admit, I am curious as to what they’re going to say about duplicate content – merely because I need a good laugh and don’t often get chuckles on an SEO front – since I stopped visiting the forums at SEOchat at least.

However, I think I’ll leave this be for now… although I can feel the urge to reply coming on.

Tags: Google, Internet, SEO by MrDaz
1 Comment »

Flakelet.com

I’ve been running various websites online now for, well, forever really. I think it goes back to 1998 somewhere, my memory fails me. The point is that I’m fairly web savvy and I know when a website looks suspect.

Due to running so many websites I’ve also had numerous emails over the years from affiliate networks, potential sponsors and various companies who have wanted me to sign up or advertise their products.

Many of which are genuine affiliate networks, many of which are not.

Again, I feel I’m pretty good at telling which are the genuine ones, and which are the spam emails destined for the deleted items folder. Yesterday however I had one email that I just couldn’t bring myself to delete, so blasé was it about its ‘free’ service to me.

Have a read of this:

From: Weng Lopez
Subject: Re: CSA Hell: Re: your site, www.CSAhell.com

Hi,

I just want you to know that your site meets our criteria and we would like to sponsor it. The membership is free but only the top-notch sites are allowed.

What’s in it for you:

- Placement in an exclusive “Best of Content-Oriented Web sites” directory.
- Free content for your site, written around your topics by our in-house writers.
- Promotion of your site across our networks of 2,000+ of blogs.
- Marketing tools developed exclusively for our members to help you drive more traffic.
- Expert advice on search engine optimization (SEO), content development, monetization, conversions, etc. to make the most of what you’ve got.
- Participation in our community support forums.
- …and more.

Note that none of these benefits are available to non-members, it is an invitation-only community for webmasters. So, if any of the above appeals to you and if you’d like an invitation, please let me know. I will send you more details.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Weng Lopez
weng.lopez@mikino.com
www.flakelet.com

I so nearly deleted it… but instead felt a compelling urge to reply, especially after I had a quick look at their website and saw what a dodgy Facebook knockoff it was.

Here is what I wrote:

So, if I understand this correctly – you want to place content on my site, with links to your sponsors, without paying me for it and have advertised this as being a free service to me?

I can see what you get out of it – websites willing to post your content promoting your sponsors, but I don’t seem to get anything out of it all. Your website seems to be using the same design as Facebook (I’m sure that’s a coincidence) and has no PR, meaning it’s fairly new or has been penalised.

In addition, should I place your content on my website I would be penalised by Google for duplicate content AND for selling links, even though I wouldn’t actually have received any money for them.

Perhaps I’ve missed something? Do let me know if I have.

Regards
Darren

I doubt I’ll get a reply back – but seriously, if anyone gets an email from these jokers, the ‘free’ membership that allows you to promote their clients without any charge to yourself isn’t the best deal you’ll find online.

Tags: CSA, Internet, SEO by MrDaz
1 Comment »

Carphone Warehouse employee lies

I’m pretty sure I’ve explained reputation management on this website before. It’s quite simple, it’s about making sure that your business or personal name features positive results in the search engines when someone searches for you.

That’s the basic idea at least. Yet most people don’t understand how this works, and they think that by visiting websites and forums that feature negative comments, and ‘pretending’ to be someone impartial who is posting a positive comment, they’ll redress the balance.

This is of course idiotic. The public aren’t that stupid and anyone who tries this will be found out for the moron that they are.

Take this comment by a ‘Carphone Warehouse customer’ for instance. The post itself ranks on the first page of Google for ‘Carphone Warehouse Complaints’, and has obviously been spotted by Carphone Warehouse themselves, who hoped to convince the 70+ people who had commented on the blog that Carphone Warehouse were in fact a good company, by pretending to be a customer.

Here is the comment in full:

Just thought I’d add, I’ve been a carphone warehouse customer for over 10 years now and have never had a bad experience with them. I have had to put 2 phones in for repair due to faults, I paid my deposit for “loan phone” and within a couple of weeks recieved my phone back working fine and had my deposit refunded within a reasonable time.

Happy customers don’t seem to get so passionate about their experience as unhappy buyers…

Surely we should be getting upset with the manufacturers issuing substandard goods onto the market, then washing their hands of said products, leaving the retailer to pick up the tab.

Sounds a little fishy doesn’t it?

The first line for example, “I’ve been a carphone warehouse customer for over 10 years now and have never had a bad experience with them” – that set the alarm bells ringing straight away. Anyone who claims to have been with Carphone Warehouse for 10 years and has never had a problem with them is clearly delusional, or not to be trusted.

The use of wording too seems a little odd, almost as though it came from a handbook “had my deposit refunded within a reasonable time”. What’s a reasonable time? Couldn’t they commit to a time?

The final paragraph that sided with the retailers clearly shows that this person works for a retailer. Nobody speaks like that otherwise.

Of course all of this is conjecture. I may be reading too much into this and this person may indeed be a genuine customer of Carphone Warehouse with 10 years of nothing but good experiences with them.

Then again, as this idiot used their REAL email address to post the comment, robinsc02@cpwplc.com, perhaps their comment should be taken with a HUGE pinch of salt.

C Robins of Carphone Warehouse; when you attempt to play reputation management online, pretending to be a customer of your own company, at least have the intelligence to NOT use your own business email address!

Muppet.

Tags: Complaints, Humour, Internet, SEO by MrDaz
18 Comments »

Spam comments on your blog

When you run your own blog, especially one hosted on Wordpress, you’ll eventually start to attract some spam comments from people trying to build links for their websites (or rather for their clients’ websites).

Unethical SEO companies employ cheap foreign workers to scour the Internet adding bogus comments to blogs, usually with the same sort of comment, and attaching links to their clients’ website. You can spot them a mile off because the comments are often nothing to do with the actual blog post, or it’s something generic such as ‘great blog, I will come back often’.

They’re also easy to spot because instead of being attributed to an actual person, the author name is always a keyword or key phrase. Very spammy.

I had two bogus comments recently, one for a dog training website and one for an ‘earn money from home’ website, neither of which were approved, naturally.

What is especially funny about this one is that whoever paid to have the ‘work from home job’ link must be really annoyed with their SEO company because the idiots even forgot to add the client link!

At least whoever has been employed by stopdogfrombarking.info had the good sense to attach a link. That site is just a portal for the website www.kingdomofpets.com, so that they don’t get caught by Google spamming the crap out of other websites.

spam-comments

Tags: Internet, SEO by MrDaz
No Comments »

BBC Pays Google for Search Rankings

No, I’m not about to write an expose on the BBC and how they have aligned themselves with the criminal underworld at Google to ‘pay’ for top listings, but if you read the Mail on Sunday this past weekend, you might think that had happened. The Mail on Sunday responsibily reported how the evil BBC was in cahoots with Google to pay money it had taken from the license payers to gain top listings in its SERPs.

What utter crap.

As ever, the headline grabbing Mail on Sunday (part of the Daily Mail) had worked the story to fit its headline and wasn’t about to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Far from the horror of the BBC illicitly paying off Google for top rankings, what had actually happened was that the BBC had run some PPC on Google Adwords.

The bastards!

The BBC using sponsored links? Whatever next? Advertising their programs on Radio One? Where will it end? Running their own weekly magazine with TV listings?

In fairness, I don’t think the reporter for the Mail on Sunday had intentionally misled the astute readers of the publication into thinking that the Beeb was paying for Google listings… no, I think he was just an idiot and had no idea what Adwords is and how it works. He’d heard that the BBC had paid Google for Adwords and without stopping to check any facts ran with the story, making himself out to be the moron he is.

However, you would have thought that others who reported the story would have checked the facts first! Bigmouthmedia has a news item on their website reporting from the same angle as the Mail on Sunday, and they’ve already attracted the attention of one blogger who’s seen through their mistake.

Perhaps the bigmouth guys are generating link bait through accusing the BBC of paying for Google rankings, as it’s certainly worked, even if it’s not exactly true!

Tags: Internet, SEO by MrDaz
1 Comment »

Using YouTube for SEO

One of the best websites to use for Internet marketing is Google’s own YouTube. By uploading videos to YouTube for your products, services or even videos that are relevant to your website you can promote your site to millions of users free of charge. Better yet, by using YouTube you can also achieve Google rankings for phrases that you would otherwise be unable to get.

For example, one of my Transformers websites uses a YouTube account to post videos from PR companies and videos I have taken myself, such as at the ‘Transformers Revenge of the Fallen’ press conference earlier this year. One of the videos uploaded to this channel was for the Transformers 2 video game, and was sent to me by Atari.

This video:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Now, that trailer has received over 17,000 views on YouTube, and in its description there is a link back to my website. It also ranks on the front page of Google for a search on ‘Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Video Game’, so anyone looking for the game will watch the video.

transformers-youtube

How has this been accomplished? This has been achieved using SEO.

This method can be replicated with practically anything. All you need to do is to create a compelling video and optimise it with the same SEO techniques you would use on your own website.

By doing this you can make YouTube work for you and increase the awareness of, and traffic to, your website.

Tags: Internet, SEO, Transformers by MrDaz
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Anti CSA website causing some problems for the CSA

My problems with the child support agency are well documented, as are a great many people’s problems I guess. Because my efforts to get them to admit their mistakes proved fruitless, even when they posted someone else’s bank details to me, I set up the anti-CSA website CSAHell.com.

This website was created to allow people who are having trouble with the child support agency to voice their problems to the world and maybe get some advice on how to deal with it.

On the website you can read emails we have received from non resident parents and parents with care who have given up hope on trying to get the CSA to do their job properly. The website also features my famed YouTube videos of phone calls I have had with the CSA.

Now, how has this impacted?

Firstly, anyone looking for the ‘child support agency’ who Google’s ‘child support agency’ is able to see my legendary CSA video on the front page of Google, as you can see here.

csa-video-google

The video has received almost 10,000 views at time of writing this, and will receive a lot more over the coming weeks and months. The ‘administrative error’ the hapless Ryan admits to on the phone is hilarious, and very damning for the CSA.

But what of people looking for ‘CSA Complaints’? Well, I have that one sewn up in spades. Not one, but TWO websites on the front page of Google, CSAhell.com and mrdaz.com.

csa-google

There’s no escaping for the CSA. We’re here to stay and we’re only getting stronger.

If you’ve been screwed over by them, have your say at CSAhell.com and tell the world your story. It will be heard, by a LOT of people.

Tags: CSA, Google, SEO by MrDaz
4 Comments »

Google News full of spam

This week I wrote about Google News and the benefits of being included in Google News, however I have noticed a great many sites that are listed that don’t deserve to be listed, either through offering poor quality content, duplicate content or content hidden behind login pages.

For example, this week I was looking for some news on business travel for a particular website and found the website for airflights.co.uk listed in Google News. The article listed seemed very suspicious so I ran it through Copyscape and found that sure enough, it was taken from an article directory.

The article published on airflights.co.uk was this one, published on May 19th. This article was copied from this website, which published the article on May 15th.

Not strictly against the rules of the article site, but certainly against Google’s TOS. You can’t duplicate content from other websites and expect to rank for it. However, not only have airflights.co.uk duplicated content, they managed to get that content listed with Google News, which is ridiculous. Does this mean that Google’s news service is going to become full of duplicate content and spam results?

It shouldn’t as Google News has a manual review process in order to gain entry, so anything like this really should flagged up. Checking Copyscape is one of the first things I do when I look at a website for SEO, so you’d think Google would be on top of that, wouldn’t you?

Even so I filed a spam report for Google, so hopefully they’ll do something about it, but history shows that spam reports filed to Google don’t necessarily have much impact.

google-spam-report

We’ll see if this one gets anywhere as I’ll be monitoring Google News for airflights.co.uk to see if their duplicate content continues to get indexed as news, when it isn’t.

Tags: Google, Internet, SEO by MrDaz
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