I understand where Troy is coming from, and I agree with his point of view, but how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust?
Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. When I got random emails they tended to be a bit less obvious than the brash "I think this would be good for your blog" and more "If you like this please link back.", but the fact that commercial SEO has ruined the process entirely is just so depressing.
> how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust?
You've answered it yourself. The web got commercialized. What was once a larger community became pockets of small communities desperately trying to hide from the cancer that is marketing, which has eaten most of the Web.
Yeah, if I wasn't already overwhelmed by stuff to be depressed about, this would be just the thing to push me over the edge. But as it is, this ship sailed a couple decades ago.
I doubt he would mind linking to an actual, good article that was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet.
Based on the list of titles, they are all literal blog spam - worthless, useless trash that contributes nothing other than absolute rubbish on the internet, largely affiliate links, fraudulent VPN reviews for whoever is the highest bidder, etc.
When you write a blog article (wordpres, medium and co), any link you point to will automatically get a notification that it's been linked to by your new article.
You can sometimes see list of comments each with a backlink at the end of a blog article, it's generated from that.
The concept is interesting, that he thinks he can penalize spammers by A) having a popular blog and B) shaming them.
In general I agree that hiring a bunch of digital marketers who go out and ask hundreds or thousands of sites to link to a blog post is not really a productive sector of the economy. I think most marketing is an unproductive sector of the economy. But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win.
Maybe there is something to Troy's idea of "if you shout too many times and too loudly I will shame you." Wouldn't it be a better world if most business growth happened through organic customer referrals, as opposed to paid marketing?
> But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win.
That isn't really necessary, it's just a zero-sum game the economy is stuck in. A world of good could be done by enlightened regulators, if they would start curtailing the worst aspects of marketing and advertising space.
In today's world, you need a megaphone to have even a tiny chance of being heard in a space where everyone else is already shouting through megaphones of their own. If someone could step in and take everyone's megaphones away, maybe then we'd have a chance at having a conversation.
For many of us, the fact that it is "unsolicited" means it is spam. I really don't care if it was an e-mail sent out to 1000 random people or it was "targeted" to 20 people just like me.
If it's commercial and unsolicited, it's spam and I will treat it as such.
I get at least 3 or 4 of these emails a week, and my site is a user-generated one along the same lines as HN or Reddit. They link to some thread vaguely related to a topic (e.g. VPNs, pets, gardening), usually compliment me on that "article", and ask me to publish their article on the subject too.
These aren't genuine requests. They're sending them to sites like mine where the request doesn't even make sense--the site isn't a blog, all they'd have to do is register and they could post any article themselves (I'd ban them immediately, but they could do it).
They're absolutely spam, and once you see a few of them you realize how formulaic they all are. There must be some tool that generates them, they usually just have some minor differences in words/phrasing (basically "spinning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning).
I've heard about it. It's actually a SEO "strategy" called link building. You just spam sites with articles related to you, asking for a link to your page, which in return raises your credibility in search results and yields better position... in theory.
Yup, and they have to do it like that because spamming links in comments no longer works because most commenting systems add a meta tag to the links so that search engines won't follow / consider them for ranking.
Also, blog comment systems these days often feature automated spam filters.
(Or petty bored admins like me; back in the days I had a wordpress blog, I once looked at the spam links I was bombarded with, identified the SEO company responsible, then went around them and mailed a customer of theirs, informing them of how their business is being promoted. It ended up with that customer dumping their SEO provider, which I found immensely satisfying.)
A guy from a company with probably the worst history of unethical or even illegal behavior in the industry, got all worked up about guys doing link building outreach.
SEOs like me don't give a rat's patoot if some guy throws a hissyfit about other SEOs contacting him for backlinks.
Whenever I do outreach, people reply with a quote on how much it costs. This is business, and I'm willing to pay.
I agree with him that those wanting a backlink for free are parasite moochers.
But the reality of the situation is that you can build great content and nobody will ever visit it if you don't build at least a few backlinks to yourself.
Build it and they will come?
Show me where, because it's certainly not in SEO.
I still gotta eat. So paid backlinks it is.
Troy can execute his evil plan. It'll fail. You think you're gonna get rankings & traffic from just including a few terms on an otherwise unrelated blogpost?
No, he doesn’t, he comes across as someone who is helping by trying to react to a serious problem in a way that, if we all did it, might go some way to solving it. I wish everyone would/could do something like this.
If you send me an unsolicited email you/your company goes on an avoid list and it would take a very strong, very personal recommendation for me to work with you after that.
Unsolicited email is targeted (or in some cases, pretty untargeted) advertising. It’s unprofessional, unpleasant and a hassle, and should be called out and heavily penalised whenever possible.
And how would I go about contacting you in a professional, pleasant and unhassling way if I genuinely have good reason to reach out and we have no prior connection?
What I hear from your conclusion is "screw anyone who isn't already in my network", and that sounds... sad?
If only people with a genuinely good reason made contact it’d be a lot easier. If someone has a such a reason then they ought to be able to explain it well enough in an email, and given that the process of avoidance isn’t automated, it’s more than likely going to get seen.
Collaborations and discussions are always welcome and it’s not hard to get in touch with me, it’s generally very easy to separate this from the spam. Twitter is a better place than email to kick off a non-spammy relationship with someone you don’t know.
That said, half of the people who send this spam think they have a genuinely good reason and I have no doubt some of them even believe it. 99% of the time there isn’t a good reason, they are after something. “I saw you do after X and we provide Y which is necessary for X” is not a good reason. For instance, even if I’m hiring, unsolicited contact from recruiters who think they can fill that role is entirely unwelcome, etc.
I can count on one hand the number of fruitful outcomes from completely cold contact that I’ve experienced in >15 years.
I've been thinking about this and my conclusion is that paying me money for my time is a good way. If you really have a good reason, it should be worth for you to pay for my time. Price can be decided through bidding, if more people want my time.
I think this is a fair way to go about the problem of being unable to reply to a few million emails every single day, if you're really famous.
If someone isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is, then they can't have a genuinely good reason to reach out to me, I figure.
That's kind of the history of all the problems facing humanity, isn't it? If we could work together, we would solve all of them. But we don't. We have this complicated mixture of self-interested behaviour and collective policing via laws and social norms but it always seems like self-interested behaviour wins out in the end. Dedicated individuals will always find the cracks in the dam.
Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet. When I got random emails they tended to be a bit less obvious than the brash "I think this would be good for your blog" and more "If you like this please link back.", but the fact that commercial SEO has ruined the process entirely is just so depressing.