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Blog Spam???? or is it SEO

I have been reading the Active Rain Blogs for a while now. Lately I have noticed several different team blogging efforts taking place. They seem to be taking different approaches on each one of them though.

First Approach I notice: was team of say 70 or 80 people getting together and each taking 3 or 4 of the team members and righting a short bio blog with links about each of those people, one person per blog. That seemed fine in fact it seemed like a very good approach, Heck I even did it with one Active Rain Member. Here is a example of that: http://activerain.com/blogsview/107572/Sandy-Oregon-Expert

It was written by Karen George - AZ Home Loans http://www.azwm.com/

Then there is this approach with takes a team of I am not sure how many and sticks a short blurb about 10 or 15 different realtors with a link to each into the one blog post: http://activerain.com/blogsview/117755/Real-Estate-Professionals-Throughout With everything that has been going on with google and yahoo related to spam and reciprocal linking and other crazy stuff this seems to be getting a little close to the edge as far as defendable linking.

Just so it is clean I am not talking about Spam as in the kind you get in e-mail and drives you crazy, I am talking about blogs that have no value and are just link farms. Don't get me wrong you write a bio about one or two agents at a time and attribute links to them as well, fine I can understand that, but 15 at a time seems like a invitation to problems down the road.

I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this as I would really hate to see Active Rain be penalized for having this sort of thing going on, or see the agents involved in it get punished for doing something they are unaware of the possible penalty.

James Boyer

Keller Williams Realty

Summit, NJ 07901

973.647.0253

About the Author

James Boyer, Realtor is a real estate consultant specializing in Real Estate Morristown
, Real Estate Madison and Real Estate Chatham. He is the team leader of the Jboyerhomes team at Keller Williams Realty, who aim to provide exceptional service and provide expert guidance in each of their client's real estate transactions. You can visit their web presence at Real Estate . http://www.jboyerhomes.com

Posted by New Jersey Real Estate James Boyer Morris, Essex & Union County NJ Realtor on 06/07/2007 02:54 PM

Comments (14)

seo, first page, new jersey, morris county

This post has been included in New Jersey Information
Post is included in group: REW Rainers
Post is included in group: First Page on Google (Networking)

14 Comments on Blog Spam???? or is it SEO

JUN

2007

Hi James-- I think I was the first organizer of this and I don't think it would be considered spam at all. SPAM is generally defined... Well, I'll just look up the exact definition:

Here you go: SPAM definitions

There are many definitions on that page, but the one thing they all have in common is "unsolicited" and "unwanted."

SPAM is generally that which is posted in public forums, like ActiveRain, but unlike AR, people are forced to read it. Like in online discussion forums for example, or perhaps spamming somebody's blog in the comment section.

I don't consider what we are doing as SPAM at all, because A.) We are simply writing about our friends and giving a little background on them for those that may be looking for a Realtor in their area and, most importantly, B.) Nobody has to read my blog. That means I can't "solicit" anyone in an "unwanted" manner.

This is simple view and I could expand on this, but as far as AR goes, I'm sticking to this. Don't want to read my blog? Don't. Then you won't have to read these Realtor's bios... But it's your choice.

Unlike SPAM.

Thanks for inviting me to comment here.

Really, I am surprised I note how you are doing it with your group which seems to be one AR member per blog post, and then I see how this other group is doing it and it seems so much more blatantly grabbing for links to improve page rank only. That is just my take on it. I may be totally off base on that.

Jim

Right James. That is what it is for. I think the other blog is over the top, yes. But I was told that I am not allowed to do anything but compliment people in my comments.

Ther other post can be described as a little spam-like, but again, how can a computer determine whether or not the other guy is linking to every member in his family- scattered all over the U.S.- or just trying to mess with page rank. The Google algorithm is far more sophisticated than that, and at the same time, far more simple.

True search engine spamming is much more simplistic and lame. I wouldn't care if a Google employee came and looked at my blog; I am just networking.

"but 15 at a time seems like a invitation to problems down the road."

I don't do 15 at a time. We mix them up and do it slowly. Even if we did do "15 at once"- Google looks for...more like 500 new links to your site. Like link farms. This is just a gentle encouragement to use these great ActiveRainers. I can't imagine- in a million years- that this would be considered spam.

Ok, I think you are understanding what my point was a little better now. I was not saying that what you Karen George are doing is wrong, I am saying that what the other team doing posts with 15 links to 15 different AR members seems like a problem waiting to happen, and if that does happen what you posted in one of your other blogs about in the next year or two AR reaching a PR8 will go right down the toilet as google slaps AR with penalties.

But that may not happen, it is just a possibility like all those Advanced Access website owners and some other company's who had lots of Reciprocal links organized into state pages and such found their sites taken out of google all together, would hate to see that at active rain.

Karen's setup was most definitely not spam. People link to each other for purposes other than SEO. Traffic, branding, etc.

As for the 15 link issue. There wasn't really anything wrong with the example you gave in regards to getting a penalty from Google, BUT it's not as effective as that team thinks it is. As the amount of links on a single page increases, the amount of PR passed decreases AND the spread causes what is passed to be diluted.

Google can easily sniff out schemes like that. PR is calculated from who links to you, who linked to them, who you link to and who they link to. Even if their were 1000 members that did this, they are all coming from within the ActiveRain domain, and a pattern of collusion would be easy to spot.

Google won't penalize Active Rain as a whole for things like that. If it would, Myspace would have been completely removed from the index a year ago :D That kind of thing also doesn't affect PR unless you have been removed. Penalties apply to search rank.

Things like this are also not as black and white. Even though you and I know that the reason behind this was solely SEO, there could be a similar scenario on a site somewhere else where it was not. The billion plus people interacting with the net makes for endless possibilities as why something is set up the way it is.

I think Google would do nothing more than assign it the same value as if they had posted no links. The wasted time they spent doing it is punishment enough :)

James

I am glad that you brought this point up as this is a topic that hits close to home. My take on it is that I feel I can recommend people that I network with in this system and that is categorically not spam. If spam is defined as a blog post without value, how can a post that gives you information about different realtors in different areas be considered spam?! If you think about it, the way the end user is most likely to find this post is by searching for a specific keyword, i.e. california real estate. Now if the end user searches for california real estate and finds one of the links that relates to california real estate and reaches a website about california real estate with plenty of information about california real estate how can one say that this is a blog of no value to the end user?? And isn't that what we're here for and what we strive to do with our hours and hours of blogging?

And how can one make the point that if you write three paragraphs per post with links it's just fine, but fifteen paragraphs with two lines each is spam? With that logic its all about length and frankly it is completely unfounded.

In my personal website I have a directory of people that I work with and I recommend for other people to use and I don't see how putting something similar in a blog constitutes spam.

But I think bringing up the point is constructive and it would be great if some of the AR administrators gave their take on it. I certainly would not want to hurt the rating of AR and if this constitutes an activity that should not be pursued, we need to know so everything can stop.

Hi Erion,

I am glad that you found this blog and were able to post on it with a open mind. What I posted was not meant to be a criticism but to ask a question. With google and Yahoo going around taking people out of their indexes for doing what is called link spamming and such I thought the question needed to be asked.

Going into this blog I was totally convinced that the blog post by Karen on a member of her blog team was not spam. I was on the fence about the post I pointed out with the 15 links to 15 different team members. It was not just that, but in looking through the blogs of the morning I has seen almost exactly the same blog post by 2 other AR members who I am 99% sure are on the same blog team.

I believe that David Kyle who posted to this blog right before you did is correct, that posting a blog with 15 links to 15 different people is almost of no worth SEO wise, Just strains out the link juice to the point that the effort in doing the post is waisted effort. I am not telling you not to do it, I am just saying that if you want to do it, it should be done on a smaller scale, one AR member per Blog seems like a real good idea, then at least you can post it to that AR members local area using the key words and the local-ism stuff, and get much more bang for the post.

I guess the effectiveness of the post can be debated. What my intention was in creating the group was to have two or three featured members per week and make this a multi step process but the problem you encounter there is that different people have different blogging and technical skills and they get confused.

I'm really hoping that the administrators will give us some indication on this so that we know if this is acceptable or not. For now I have taken the post with the links off just to see how this plays out.

I think that you are on the right track with getting people involved and such, but I think that the best approach would be to have each member write a broad overview of themselves to send to the member who is assigned to blog about him or her, and then have that member write something going off what was said.

It does not have to be long, a few sentences with 1 to 3 links is probably good and possibly a picture.

Just my ideas of how this would work, each agent posts a bio blog like that about another agent every 2 or 3 days, and by the end of the first week, have each team member assigned to write something else about themselves or their market, or some nitch they are trying to fill and sent that off to the others to write about for them with links. That is how I envisioned the team would work.

I am still interested in taking part, but not really interested in posting blogs that don't have any real value i would rather focus on doing things that help others and help me, Win Win or No Deal!!!

Jim

JUN

2007

Wow! You all got me with this one! I've been a bit puzzled over the entire process and have held off until I feel what I am doing will be the right thing to do.

Hi Teri,

Thanks for the comment on my blog on blog spam. Though I am not sure that the blog I was pointing out with 15 links to 15 different realtors would be penalized as blog spam, I am sure that the links placed in it are very close to totally worthless SEO wise, and as far as anyone in those peoples local markets ever seeing that post I would not hold out much hope.

I have been trying to get people to do posts on a individual basis, where we exchange info with each other including link and such, and then each of us posts a blog about another member with their links and using their home market key words. Done it once already and got some good PR1 Links out of it. I think if done with members who are on first page it would be even more effective. Personally I will be first page within a few weeks, as My blogs have been getting read by the public and I have gotten several calls in the last week on them.

Would you be interested in taking part?

Jim

JUN

2007

personally I see no danger for active rain. Because search engines know that there will be people abusing it. If Active Rain would be penalized, then Google would have to penalize its very own blogger and blogspot.

Mike Dammann

http://www.propertyhogs.com

NOV

2008

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