Imagine you own a business. You need a website, so you hire a programmer to build one for you. You need content, so you hire someone to write articles for you. Now you have this great website, but you don’t have any visitors. The next step would be to hire an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professional to get your site ranking higher in Google, Yahoo and co.
One way to boost a site’s rankings is by linking to it from other websites. So let’s imagine your website is about organic tea. Your SEO professional might email other tea-related websites and ask if they would link to you, but chances are they won’t. He might go onto a chat forum and mention your site, but how many people out there are talking about organic tea? Does this guy even know enough about organic tea to hold a conversation on the topic? Unlikely.
A good SEO professional will try to get legitimate links from relevant sources. On the other hand, less ethical “professionals” choose the easier option of spamming blogs and social bookmarking sites such as JapanSoc.
JapanSoc, like other social bookmarking sites, is an easy target. Once you’ve registered, you can submit any website you like. I’ve already seen Hawaiian weddings, CSS style sheets, and of course, organic tea among the upcoming stories. On some occasions, these submissions have actually been quite good! The title is descriptive and the summary of the site has been well-written. If you were paying for these links, you’d probably be quite proud of their quality.
The problem is, the SEO “professional” has wasted his time because his submissions aren’t related to Japan… which means they are spam, spam, spam, spam, with a hint of spam. You’ve put your heart into your organic tea business, you’ve had a fantastic website designed for you, and you’re not even aware that you are responsible for all this spam.
As long as people are paying for SEO, spam will continue. While I can do my best to ban and block every spammer that signs up at JapanSoc, I urge you to help me out by hitting the “bury” link on any spam submission. Thank you! 🙂
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!
I agree. Bury the spam, non relevant, junk. If it’s related to the social bookmarking site my opinion is that’s fine. If it’s not relevant then… “moving on!”
Dude, you know you just have to email me a list of files you want me to soc or bury and I will obey your command!
I noticed a CSS related post the other day and buried it. I’ll keep doing so. I’m surprised there isn’t more spam to be honest.
Well, if you’re a spammer…
1. You have to register
2. You have to enter a Captcha (to prove you’re human)
3. Your submission goes into the queue (upcoming stories)
4. You have to avoid users burying it into deletion
5. Hope Nick doesn’t “killspam” you (delete spam and disable user)
6. Hope Nick doesn’t block your IP from accessing the site
The great thing about social bookmarking is that the upcoming stories queue acts as a filter, preventing spam from flooding the front page.
Oh yeah I completely forgot you had to register to submit, I’m always logged in. The current spammers have been very dedicated then.
The points here are pretty solid, but if I were a SEO “professional” who made his living by submitting sites to social media sites, I wouldn’t limit myself to just one login or IP. Sure, I would use the net connection at my home or work, but there are lots of people that don’t protect their wireless networks from the general public.
There are also lots of places that offer wireless internet, either for free or a semi-reasonable price (unless you’re in Vancouver), so banning an IP doesn’t really do much to prevent a particular person from doing what they’re going to do. This can also backfire pretty bad if the IP you’re banning belongs to a library or school. One bad apple could effectively destroy a great resource for people in search of information.
While there are lots of ways Nick could make it harder for spammers to use JapanSoc, any change would also make it hard for new and current members to post articles.
But, that said, we Soc’ers will no doubt bury anything that isn’t worthy of submission to Japan’s best English social media site. Don’t worry, Nick, we’re on the case 🙂
A little off topic, but JapanSoc has quickly become one of my favourite social media sites. I would never have found some of the quality blogs out there regarding Japanese politics and odd news without it.
Thanks for making it possible, Nick! I’ll be sure to treat you to coffee when we finally get together 😛
Great to hear that Jason. I think we’ve got a good crowd of users who are genuinely interested in similar things. It could have easily gone the otaku or gravure idols route, but what we have now is really quite unique.
Thank GOD that has not happened!!
It seems to be maturing at a nice rate. When time permts I’ll try to contribute more articles. I have a few blogs I read that have not been soc’d so far.
Mwa ha ha ha – I have been given the green light at last. Release the hounds!