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Went Hot: March 25, 2008 - 9:42 am
Posted By: tomcritchlow 47 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk)
Category: SEM Industry
11 Comments
Went Hot: March 25, 2008 - 9:42 am
Posted By: tomcritchlow 47 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk)
Category: SEM Industry
11 Comments
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Comments
What is so blatant about this spam exactly? Compiling product pages that can be easily indexed is now spam? The only spammy thing I see is not the page itself rather the number of similar pages they are creating:
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/67/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/66/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/65/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/64/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/63/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/62/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/61/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/60/
Throwing a lot of poop at the wall so to speak.
How is this spam?
This is nothing but a witch hunt. Come on Dave, I know that you have some examples of real spam somewhere. Why target Dell when there is obviously nothing there?
To be clear, I don't think this is necessarily spamming in as much as it's cloaking, or redirecting or anything but this is generating pages (from a database as Dave points out) that are designed to capture eyeballs which serve little purpose to the user.
Whether it falls on the side of white hat or grey hat i dont' really care but implementing pages like these:
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/lap-tops/71/
http://laptops.dell.co.uk/laptops/60/
Is really messy and gives SEO a bad name.
Perhaps spamming is a bad name for it but I think for such a big name to do something this messy (for want of a better word) makes the whole SEO business look like we're back in 2000.
That's why I sphunn the post. But feel free to disagree (and I don't take the desphinns personally at all - I welcome healthy discussion)
I wouldn't say it makes SEO look like its back in 2000, just the morons at Dell, lol
Uh, they're inserting the search term in the URL creating multiple pages of the same product and then injecting dabatase content to make them appear unique. What kind of spamming would you people like to see? Just because it's not "blatant" doesn't make it not spam.
Highlighting it as bad SEO is the error. Dave called it spamming.. which is correct, and confirmed by the exposed database calls. He noted it was not SEO, and suggested people would think it was, which makes it even worse. The Sphinn post highlights the connection to bad SEO.
It's bad web design, driven by ignorance. Dell needs some SEO help. That database call in the comments is more embarassing than the dumb-ass site architecture, as it proves spammy intent.
Dave, as always, is a man of few words but they are quite effective if you actually read them carefully.
Dell is trying to SEO their way back to 1999 by refreshing the classic hit: doorway pages!
SEO's inherited the spam techniques whether we like it or not. Almost a decade ago, when the techniques weren't yet deemed shady and abusive, and just a "smart" way of optimizing a website's presence in the SERPs, it became the property of SEO. Now we have to defend against the old naive days, and prove that the good ones improved with the times.
If this was an intentional spam tactic (and not just stupid web design), it's quite possible it could be a bad SEO. Absolutely. And therefore, bad SEO.
Although working with many ecommerce developers, Dell really may not have someone thinking 'spam' as it appears. This could be a group of designers with very little SEO knowledge thinking they're creating a good user experience by having options, or just creating these options for dell's internal linking discretion. Of course, links tend to run away on their own. Dell may not be thinking about keywords in URLs in relation to SE's, but to users.
I don't know if we'd find the intent, but John Andrews is right that Dell needs a good SEO. I just hope it's a modern one.
Besides the amusement factor of spammers outing spammers, the copy on those pages is simply hilarious!
"Cheap laptops deals have never been such good value."
Ahaha...and they have hidden links too. (I removed the actual link here, but when I pasted in the sentence, the word "laptop" was linked to one of their spammy pages.)
The question is...is any of this spam actually working?
The pages don't seem to be indexed from what I'm seeing...of course, now I just noticed this post was over a week old so they may have been removed.