SearchInfluence

It’s been a bit over three years since I’ve used the once-titanic blogging site LiveJournal for anything. LiveJournal’s still got an active community, but it’s true that asking “What’s your LJ name?” of a new acquaintance is a little bit more embarrassing today than it was in 2003. My account’s dead (nah, it’s not on DeadJournal), but every few months, some brave archaeologists attempt to set up some horrible advertisements within the internals of this hibernating brute.

Here’s one of the emails I got:

Google is feeding local business owners to the wolves with their latest Places update. Lior Ron, Google Places Product Manger, announced yesterday evening that Google will be “helping” business owners keep their business listings updated by now allowing anyone, mischievous competitors included, to edit your entire Places listing for you. Yes, even if it is verified.

How… thoughtful of Google.

Damn it feels good to be a Panda.

Over two weeks ago, Google scared the SEO community by publicly releasing what even they called a “ ...

CityGrid Media, who recently invested significantly in Orange Soda (an SEO/PPC firm out of Utah) has chosen to use the favored tactic of Nigerian princes and Offshore Link-Exchangers to drum up business for their new partner Orange Soda.

CityGrid Media (Orange Soda) Form Spam Image

I’m very surprised to see this kind of thing from a company of this stature.

I’m glad to see that the address is in New York and not American Fork Utah as I’m fairly confident the folks I’ve known at Orange Soda wouldn’t condone this behavior.

Full text of email message follows:

No one likes SPAM! I’m not talking about the canned meat product. I happen to like the stuff myself. It reminds me of camping when I was a kid. What I am talking about is that which clogs our inboxes, dilutes and degrades the integrity and usefulness of … well, pretty much every new form of communication that arises.

In Twitter’s blog post “State of Twitter Spam” they identify

Twitter SPAM as “behaviors that range from insidious to annoying. Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention”