As you may remember, I actually kind of liked my regular spammers because they were entertaining and they were always telling me how awesome I am. I never did get too many of them, and now that I’ve upped my site security I don’t hear from any of them anymore at all. #MissYouLAEscortSpammers
I do, however, still hear from one spam-factory which consistently hits the feedback form on the Stories on AO3 page, and I absolutely hate them: the On-Page SEO spammer. It’s always the same copy-pasted paragraph containing the same horrible SEO advice, with a link leading to some horrible spammy page. And they constantly spam blogs all over the Web with the same crap, this person is a serial spammer and it’s infuriating. It also makes me worry that some people who don’t understand what SEO actually is might read their badly-written spam comment and believe what it says. So let’s talk about SEO for a minute.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which in a nutshell means getting more people to visit your site by trying to rank higher in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – which if we crack the nut to get to the kernel inside means trying to do things that will make your pages show up on the first page of Google search results, or at least in the top two or three.
Beyond that, there are two kinds of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat, with a third one, Grey Hat, futzing around in the shady area in between. White Hat means working with your content and keywords and getting people to share your stuff – it’s a lot of work and it can take a while to pay off. Black Hat means spamming forums and comment threads, keyword stuffing, and all in manner of slimy tactics which make the Internet a less-fun place to be – basically, trying to scam your way to the top of the SERPs as quickly as you can. For a more detailed explanation, have a look at this handy infographic:
Just as a side note, Google does not think very highly of this game no matter what hat you’re wearing, so they tweak the algorithms that determine placement in the SERPs on a regular basis. And when an SEO person asks them what they’re currently looking for on a top-ranking site, all that person hears in response is evil laughter.
Okay, now that you know what SEO is in a very general sense (and I’ve made the obligatory reference to Evil!Google), let’s go back to our SEO spammer and their ‘recommendations’ about all the things they say you’re supposed to be doing on whichever page they’re spamming. What they’re actually trying to do is get you to click the link in their comment because SPAM, although they’re also supposedly promoting an SEO plugin that will do all of the recommended tricks for you automatically. And here’s why implementing something like that wouldn’t be a good idea:
- Header tags: They’re saying you should use all three header tags in your post/page. But using header tags doesn’t really apply to most regular pages or posts on a normal chatty blog – those tags are best used in places where you need clear divisions in a long page of content, like text-heavy sales copy, lengthy FAQs, or online reports. Adding multiple header tags arbitrarily, especially to content which doesn’t need such divisions in the first place, doesn’t make any sense and will just make your content hard to read. Which means people won’t stick around to read it.
- Bold and Italics: Using bold and italics isn’t a bad idea, but if your content needed bold and/or italics you’d have already put it in there, right? Keep in mind that text formatting is either used sparingly to enhance the text or is overused and therefore annoying. DON’T BE ANNOYING.
- Links: They make it sound like you’re supposed to be using various kinds of links in your text according to some sort of formula. Like text formatting, you should use links as necessary and not according to some pre-determined idea that all content should have a certain number of each kind of link. Rule of thumb: If you mention a page or post on your site, that mention should be a link – that’s what’s called an internal link, it goes to someplace on your own site. If you mention someone else’s site or content that you like or use, that mention also should be a link – that’s an external link, it points outside your site to some other location on the Wild Wild Web. If you didn’t mention anything link-able, well then your content isn’t going to have any links in it this time. Don’t add irrelevant links just to have a link showing up, that confuses your readers and tips off Google’s site-crawling spider that you’re playing SEO games.
- Keywords: Your content is about something, your keywords define what that something is. For example, if I write a post about keeping snails out of my garden, my keywords could be gardening, snails, pest control, and flame-thrower. If I was keyword stuffing (Black Hat!), I’d also work in Kardashian, puppies, sale, Trump, and zombies. Keywords can go in your text, in the alt tags on your images, or in your page’s metadata. Or, if you’ve still got the black hat on, in hidden text somewhere on the page – which is a trick that will actually make Google ban you from the SERPs, just so you know. Keyword frequency and placement can be important, especially if you’re writing for a company site or a monetized blog, but you actually learned the basics of how to manage that waay back in high school and you just didn’t realize it. It works the same way you’d compose a simple essay: You’re going to hit the high points (keywords) in your first paragraph, elaborate on those points (keywords) in the middle, and then summarize (keywords) at the end. Correctly chosen keywords fit into your content smoothly; if you have to shoehorn them in, you’re doing it wrong. And if you shoehorn them in and then put links on them…go stand in the corner and think about why what you did was bad.
- Auto Text and Formatting: Remember, this spammer claims to be offering a plugin which does everything for you according to their SEO guidelines – that means this theoretical plugin would be editing your text automatically, adding header tags, formatting, links, and keywords. If you aren’t sure why this is a bad idea, go get a book of Mad Libs, find someone to ask for random words to fill in the blanks with, and then look at the result. If you’re carefully crafting your content, especially if you’re a writer, this would be a disaster. If you’re not carefully crafting your content, enjoy the Mad Libs and no, filling the whole thing in doesn’t mean you just wrote a book.
Now, some legitimate SEO people will still tell you that you need to use all of these ‘tricks’ in your content to optimize for Google (and, as an aside, for other search engines), and this is why I disagree: You aren’t supposed to be optimizing your site for Google, you’re supposed to be optimizing it for your readers. Well-written content, formatted for easy reading. Relevant, working links. Decent-looking images where appropriate. A site that actually works and is pleasant to look at, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly. Did I mention well-written content? Okay, it’s worth mentioning twice. Because Google is not your audience, people are. Google’s spider does not read your content, it just scans the page looking for things to tell it what the page is about. It looks to see if existing links are valid and relevant. It looks at how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from. It looks to see if you have people in other places linking to your content. And why do people link to your content?
Because your content is worth linking to, that’s why. Which is why our SEO spammer spams of course: The content they’re so shadily promoting isn’t worth linking to, so they have to crap it out all over everyone else’s sites if they want anyone to see it at all.
(Author’s note: Going back over this post, I couldn’t help but notice that I had effectively black-hatted it in a few places while trying to explain what black-hat is. Apologies to any of you who showed up here looking for the political opinions of undead celebrity-owned puppies.)