Syzlak’s SEM

The Rise of the Shady Marketer

Posted on: January 18, 2008 by Syzlak 4 Comments

Earlier this week I had a quick thought about the site 1on40. I believe that thought was “bullshit.” A little later that same day, I found a restupulous post about how to increase web traffic through forums. A few days ago, the SEM community was abuzz with the now legendary SEL v. Wired v. Johnon v. SEOmoz v. MVanDeMar v. SEL.

What happened? Here we have 3 examples of some shady-assed shit going down in what was slowly becoming a respected industry. On the SEL v. Wired issue, I sit in the middle. I don’t think it was such a hot idea to post a “how-to” that essentially (I know it wasn’t the intent…) suggested people hit Wired for a link. While many of us probably read this post and were somewhat intrigued, there were most likely many more that jumped at the opportunity to spam Wired for clicks. The subsequent backlash from the SEM community prompted much debate and thankfully changes to the site, article, etc.

The trouble is, many members of the community were upset that such a post was made in the first place. The problem for most of the community was that the article made us (SEL members, semi-responsible interactive marketers ) look like bottom dwelling miscreants willing to exploit any loophole for personal and professional gain. It made us look like spammers & cheats, as does 1on40.com.

1on40 promises to propel your site to the top of Google. How can they do that?!??!? They’re glad you asked

We do NOT:

• cheat search engines
• trick search engines
• create any sort of doorway pages
• create dodgy links
• make mistakes that jeopardise your site
• change any code on your site
• redirect
• get YOU banned from search engines
• divulge how we get your web site to the 1st result of GOOGLE + 39 BUT… we do! And for FREE…

We do:

• get you to 1st result on the TOP 40 search engines to include GOOGLE & YAHOO
• take your web site to NUMBER ONE for 5 keywords

Well shit dawg! After you’ve hit number 1 (which, if you’re not familiar with the Google, you may never do) then they’ll let you sit atop Google et. al. for a week before charging you to bid on 5 keywords. I must admit that of all the restupulous SEO schemes out there, this one is well thought out. I mean, it’s bullshit, but it’s well thought out. Just look at the, rather long, list of directories, engines, etc. that they submit your site too!

Thank God they submit to james, jimmy and Juicy Babes! I’ve had the hardest time getting respect for my site, but now that I have jimmy and the Juicy Babes working for me, I’m golden! Do you not know jimmy? That guy’s bat shit crazy about ranking and won’t stop till he sees your site hit number 1.

Oh, by the way, they also submit to Inktomi, so if you really need to rank well on the Wayback Machine’s index of MSN listings from 2002 then you’re set.

As for the other post I referenced earlier, “How to increase your web site traffic through forums.” Didn’t we do this? Isn’t this just one of the reasons why we have rel=no follow? Doesn’t everyone hate people like this? This just isn’t cool. Couple that with the fact that most of the forums that are used as examples in his post are porn, and you have a very poorly researched/thought out article.

Speaking of which, porn! That’s the market we all need to be in on. Let’s see how your Christian Supply URLs in your signature please your client. Way to go ass clown!

Oh Syzlak, chill it around! These sites are just poor examples of bad characters that you happened to stumble upon. There’s no reason to worry.

You’re right, I did StumbleUpon (see what I did there?) these sites (not SEL mind you) and my professional account is filtered to only show me sites with advertising, search, internet and liquor (again, that’s a prerequisite right?). Which means that people interested in the same categories felt that these posts were important enough to “thumb up.” Through inference, we can assume that the shady marketer is again on the rise…