What's Your Most Jaw-Droppingly Spammy Link ( or Promo) Request?
-
Sheesh.
I get them every day. But this one takes the cake. It's from a woman I met once in my life on a long run with my running club. That was two years ago. Now she wants me to endorse her -- even though I know nothing about her professionally.
But wait, there's more. She's not much of a runner. As it happens, I know a thing or two about fitness -- having edited a fitness magazine and worked on websites for many top fitness and nutrition pros. The idea of an MSW doing fitness programs for people with medical problems raises all kinds of red flags.
She sent this Facebook IM:
Hi Daniel - hope all is well! I was wondering if you can share my page with your friends, with the following message (or something similar). Thank you so much in advance!
My friend XXXXXX, MSW, has been running XXXX Personal Training for the past 18 years. She specializes in exercise programming for people who have medical problems, everything from heart problems to chronic pain conditions. She works on site in her clients' homes in midtown and downtown XXXXXX. Please contact her if you know anyone who would benefit from her expertise.
http://www.facebook.com/pagesXXXX
XXXX Personal Training
We specialize in helping people who are experiencing medical issues incorporate exercise into their treatment plan. We work as a team with all other professionals involved in your care, whether that is your medical doctor, naturopath, physiotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor, massage therapist, or...
Page: 141 like this[note from SEOmoz staff: we ask that you keep this post TAGFEE and not include specific names, URLs, or phone numbers in your response. Thanks!]
-
lol.... thanks for the laugh!
-
Right. In a previous life, I headed the news dept. of a TV station.
I would regularly get calls from clueless PR people who asked the question: "Did you get my press release?"
What I always felt like saying (but usually was able to restrain myself from saying) was:
"How the hell would I know? And please F&*% off and die a slow painful death. We receive hundreds of press releases every day and 99.99% of the time it's a waste of our time to have even the most junior staff member read them. You have cost me time and money -- and how dare you? I resent it, I hate you, and I have now made a mental note of the idiot company dumb enough to have hired you. BTW, I'm wondering how this call even eneded up being routed to me. Something went wrong."
-
I have a blog that gets very short posts about industry news (not promotional stuff - genuine news).
I hate it when somebody sends a spammy promo request (which either gets deleted manually or filtered (thanks to gmail you can have an unlimited number of filters).
Then they call on the phone to be sure that I got it.
I feel like saying... "Nobody gives a damn about your ________ (tenth anniversary, staff changes, retirements, president's chest thumping video)". My readers would unsubscribe if I published that crap.
-
Not really a spammy link promo or anything, but I have an SEO client who ranks number 1 for...
generic keyword such as : "land survey company" and 20 surround cities. He emailed me a couple day ago asking me to target "company surveying city name" sigh....
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Why are bit.ly and ow.ly links showing up as Inbound Links?
Hello! I noticed this question was asked a while back (around 2013 i think), but I still don't quite understand why I'm seeing these shortened URLs come up as Inbound Links? Can someone please explain? Thanks,
Link Building | | txwildcard
Carlos0 -
How do I search for a link within a competitors website that is linking my website?
Hello, I have just been checking my link profile and according to webmaster tools a competitor is linking to my website. Is there anyway of finding this link besides looking at every page within their website? Many thanks
Link Building | | mblsolutions0 -
How to link build?
Hello all. I've been having intense conversations with an experienced SEO, who has told me that the only way to get consistent links to your website, and to build you business through the web is through blogger outreach, and then paying the bloggers to put your appropriate content on their high Page Ranking website. To me, this may well be right. But it sounds dull as anything. Any thoughts? William
Link Building | | wseabrook0 -
Does the twitter link shortening service reduce link value (strength).
We have many SEO team members that use Twitters link shortening service, will this reduce the strength or value of the page to be indexed? I ask this cause the displayed URL isn't the actual page it is going to and would like to make appropriate changes to improve our company's SEO For example: http://t.co/zHu8vIcjPx is going to page http://4wheelonline.com/atv/QuadBoss.107503 Thank you for your assistance.
Link Building | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Do links from the second page of an article pass link juice?
I have been writing for some sites with a high overall page rank and the articles are being viewed as quality by search engines as well. However, they usually put a link to my site at the very end of the article and then break the article down into two pages to increase ad revenue. It seems that I'm not getting much credit for that link even if the page has a high SEOmoz/PR score. I want to know if I am getting the benefit from these links. If not, how do I make sure I get the most bang, even if my link is on a second page of the article? Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/
Link Building | | LawrenceWatkins0 -
What's a really good example of a linkbait-y Category / Subcategory hierarchy?
Rand makes a really great point in this 2009 post about the shape of crawl paths: "#4. Craft navigation / category pages that are worthy of links. If you can make these pages worthy of links and attention, you drive PageRank and crawl priority further down your site's architecture into the content (and signal the engine that ALL your pages are important." Which makes sense, intuitively, because you'd like link juice to flow directly and undiluted to your money pages. "Here's all my Green Widgets, Roger: they're all right here. While you're at it, here's a related blog post—'5 Ridiculously Awesome Things Every Green Widget Buyer Should Know'—and, oh look! Would you like to see my Blue Widgets as well?" In practice, though, the Home » Widgets » Green Widgets doesn't sound all that alluring. Useful, absolutely, for UX, but not for getting links. Anyone have some favorite examples of Category / Subcategory hierarchies that do well as link-bait? Client is a marketing agency dealing in the technical arcana of databases and ad serving, so their money pages won't be as specific as a Green Widget or a Miami Hotel. Their site isn't huge, and the pages will be extensively interlinked, so the emphasis has more to do with link juice / page authority than indexation. But I'm wondering if it could it be smart to replace a generic "Services" category with a KW-rich drop-down menu of "Marketing Solutions" (i.e. 'Increase Customer Retention') and link each landing page to a relevant charcuterie of services, white papers, webinars, case studies, etc., rather than keeping these pages in their respective silos—even as they link horizontally to related services?
Link Building | | sweetfancymoses2 -
Link Churn - where have all my links gone?
I am sure most of you have asked yourself the question I'm asking right now.. Where have all my links gone? I am starting to get twitchy now. I would estimate we have lost around 60% of our links in the past 3 weeks. Does anyone have any comeback stories? Feel like I am back to the start again. I have made a number of changes on the site not least removing a reciprical link page.. that had over 200 links on it but from reading one of Rand's tweets is it true that linking out could be good again?
Link Building | | robertrRSwalters0