Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The RSS feed creates a link back to the article page and some folks put the feed into their page template used by their CMS to create every page on their site, limiting the number of article headlines to 5 or 10.
This is link bait gone mad. I've put in a spam report on this and hope others will do the same if you spot it.
Cheers
Sid
Please stop reporting my sites! =P
Seriously tho...
At a certain point, even the whitest of the white, pristine, ivory webmasters need to realize that sending in spam reports on this type of low effectiveness technique will eventually lead to some absurd penalty being put into place that affects YOUR legitimate use of RSS feeds, or whatever it is.
I'd be more interested in finding out how my competitors are getting PR 4+ links by the hundreds.
This type of stuff shouldn't even be a blip on your annoyance radar.
That's time better spent figuring out how to use the same technique in a safe, highly effective, ranking technique that Google would eat up.
Trust me, one of the smartest things you could do is find out all the low effective, "blackhat" "spammy" techniques and refine them to use as white hat (or at least light-gray hat) techniques.
In truth, if someone's using it to spam, there's "usually" a much better way to use the idea behind the technique to rank and sleep well.
It turns out that the best way to cut this kind of stuff out is to point out what a daft fish the webmaster is for taking such grubby bait.
Got me a link back for being a good neighbour as well.
I prefer to get all my white hats in a row and hope Google knocks a few black hats off my dodgy competitors.
Until a few months ago I recognised all of my on-line competitors, I'd met most of them in person and knew about their on and off-line businesses in quite a bit of detail. Now I'm up against snotty kids, I've never heard of, who play at Webmaster with one hand while racing in Grand Theft Auto on their XBox 360 with the other, in a bedsit over a chip shop in Bolton. OK its not quite that bad but you get the picture.
We are an ethical long standing company with a mission critical web site and a brand name to protect. Why would I risk that by doing stuff that search engines will definitely penalise one day. I'd rather get other folks penalised and keep my white hat clean, thank you very much.
Cheers
Sid
Now I'm up against snotty kids, I've never heard of, who play at Webmaster with one hand while racing in Grand Theft Auto on their XBox 360 with the other, in a bedsit over a chip shop in Bolton. OK its not quite that bad but you get the picture.
Here! Here! It wouldn't be so bad if we were up against "professional" black hats. But the problem is that a bunch of newbies get some idea off a black hat forum, implement it, Google penalises everyone, those newbies clear off BUT Google leaves the penalty in place. Before you know it Google is going to have an algorithm that penalises everything even though most of the rubbish isn't ... oh ... wait ... they already have ...
We are an ethical long standing company with a mission critical web site and a brand name to protect. Why would I risk that by doing stuff that search engines will definitely penalise one day. I'd rather get other folks penalised and keep my white hat clean, thank you very much.
I think internetheaven got my point...
I'm way to busy trying to get 4 listings on the first page for my clients(or mine) main brand and working on getting a double-indented (and one day, 4 more listings) for another brand in the same niche, to worry about "Xbox GTA wannabes".
ALL white hat, all from modified techniques I probably learned from a black hat.
And yes, Google LOVES my clients/sites ('cept when they are messing up with #6 issue) and wouldn't dare "misplace" them from the top 10.
It's NOT about the technique, it's about the CONCEPT
My first thought would have been,
"How can I get my feeds syndicated on 10-20+ trusted sites with real ranking power?"
Not,
"how can i report this ineffective technique to Goog?"
See?
