Could you expand on the content performing well? If it is useful and informative and accurate, I wouldn’t consider it spam. Someone who gets targeted ads for a brand in their email and finds those ads useful for sales probably doesn’t consider the email spam. Similar line of logic here for me.
Thanks for the comment. Why do you consider it spam? Can you elaborate? I'm not selling anything. It's a case study with examples, and a step by step guide, on how to rank higher in Google in far less time, and for free, by doing doing a different method content marketing.
The article is an overview aimed at beginners, but as such actually pretty good and helpful. It does not seem to overtly promote their product. Classifying this as spam / SEO only because one is not the target group is not fair.
Or it's the opposite of spam: it could be a testimonial from paying customers that the content is worth it.
90% of the time I'd rather see a link to a paid source than one to the ad-revenue-hunting blogging-with-a-fancy-name Business Insider, Forbes, etc sites of the world.
I think you nailed it...today, many sites blur the line between "spam" and "content". Ridiculous viagra ads are obvious spam, and Wikipedia is obvious content - but what about eHow? I may very well find a good answer on that site, but the site is littered with ads, the quality is usually terrible because it is mass-produced with quantity in mind instead of quality, and lots of answers are basically duplicates because fresh content is good for seo. What about a site whose only content is "top X" lists, or one who ranks high but the actual content is hidden behind a paywall?
That blurry distinction between useful content and spammy content is tough for an algorithm (and a person) to sort out.
No, it's not. Good spam looks like real content, but isn't accurate. It's an article about the most eco friendly kitchen appliance that reads just fine, but littered with factual inaccuracies and exists solely to give the impression that somebody has taken the time to write an actual article on the topic. It's often below GPT2 level, and I'm sure we'll have great fun with autogenerated SEO content in the future.
Hey, I'm the author of this post on Indie Hackers. I added some data and evidence at the bottom of that post. The content and site is performing really well.
I wasn't counting 1st party spam as spam because in many cases I like the information I get (usually sales on things I buy). I should have pointed that out in my post. Thanks for making the distinction.
If it's coming across as spam, I don't think they are doing it right:)
I have friends that make a killing from SEO and they have blogs on Tumblr and cough Posterous that they tactically use for SEO. They also spend hours writing the content.
For me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they don't come and bug me with it.
For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write.
It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.
Yes, my site with no ads which demonstrates how rankings work and how page construction influences search is spam. Because losing money on every search you do for the benefit of informing people how search both works, and could work is such an awful endeavor. What was I thinking?
Just because a link is added to content after the content already exists doesn't immediately qualify it as spam. 99% of links being spam is a pretty massive assertion, is that anecdotal or backed by any actual data?
I don't think it's spam when a subscriber chooses which categories of your site they want to receive in a newsletter...
This was a recruitment firm letting their subscribers pick the categories of jobs they receive in their newsletter. I think this is anything but spam. Cuts out the things they aren't interested in and makes sure they only receive jobs relevant to their search.
Other companies using the service are doing similar - sending relevant articles to subsets of their audience - not even for commercial purposes. We have educational institutes using the service for sending information to students.
Maybe it was the word automation that concerned you in this but I think done correctly it can be a big benefit for subscribers and content producers.
reply