SEO Best Practices & The Water Army
“Water Army” Floods The Web
Like some of the most famous hired hands in history — the Greek mercenaries bought by the Persians or Nottingham purchasing the help of Celtic warriors in the tale of Robin Hood — there has been a plot a foot in China consisting of a hired army. This inappropriate and immoral group has been labeled a Water Army, as they are “flooding” the internet with comments, reviews, stories and any other user generated content that can be utilized to drive up product sales and fight off competitors. Sadly, this tactic is more like water torture as it’s used in our realm of Search Engine Optimization and Link Development.
Here at Intrapromote we like to reinforce our ideals and reassure our SEO tactics to be of great value, and morally sound. It’s important for us to bring these immoral and misleading tactics to light, and reassure the good people of society that there is a team of “good guys” out there in their fight for web supremacy.
Paid Posting Business (Nonsense)
A team of researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada led by Cheng Chen, analyzed data and even went undercover to learn all that they could of this Paid Posting business. Chen and his team ultimately utilized this data and the strategies of these companies to develop software that identified with great accuracy (88 percent) paid posters from genuine posters on sites that had thousands of comments. Some of the interesting details they found included:
- Paid posters post more comments than they do replies to already existing comments
- Paid posters also on average post every two and half minutes
- Paid posters cut and paste a very large amount of their posts as they are paid by the number of posts they produce.
Does this sound like anyone you know, or any site you have visited recently?
Seo best practices are like a good roast beast.
It’s common to find websites and companies that promise you bulk results, including your name and url on thousands of websites. But just like many things, quality is better than quantity. It is known that Google gives more weight to links that have relevant quality content, so does it do you any good to have a link on a sporting goods store if you are a small business music store? Not much, as mentioned by our relative link development specialist Bobby Pham here.
Good SEO = Good Whoville Roast Beast
Yes we all want numbers and results, but it’s proven that SEO is like a good Whoville roast beast, it takes a significant amount of time to cook if you really want it to be good! How long will it be before Cheng Chen and the group at the University of Victoria has their software integrated into Google, Yahoo and Bing, not to mention all of the online retailers like Ebay, Amazon, and anyone else with an online retail presence? They are all continuing to evolve and soon will know how to combat misleading and immoral reviews and comments. It’s inevitable.
These misleading paid posters and their false, skewed comments and content are like the kids from elementary school that are always trying to cut in line. It works for a while until finally someone bloodies their nose! It’s really a test of patience in order to reach long term prosperity and SEO success, and to accomplish this we must integrate best practices and the best long term strategies. These include verifying quality link placement, doing the social media leg work, and optimizing your site’s content to connect with the market you’re targeting.
And I think I know a company that’s pretty excellent at this…
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