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SEMpdx is an “all volunteer” organization, and cleaning up comment and forum spam comes with the job. However, when these time sucking wastes of pixel space come from someone that is supposed to be “in the industry”, it really ticks me off.

Sifting through several hundred morning e-mails Thursday, I ran across two newly submitted forum posts awaiting approval. One was supposed to go in our Portland “local search marketing jobs” forum and one was slated for the SEM business forum.

As soon as I took a look at the first few lines, with their poor punctuation and grammar, I knew they were crap, even though they were intended to be “on topic”.

I didn’t delete the forum posts immediately, and a couple of hours later I got two separate emails from David Mihm, and Tom Hale, who both help moderate the forum.

Each of them wanted to be sure they should just delete these recent “contributions”, and since all of us moderators appeared to be unanimous on the fact that these were crap, I told them to go ahead.

As I began looking at one of the posts, I realized that they “supposedly” came from a real company in Colorado, called Peak Studios. Besides the two emails from the other moderators, I also got a new blog user notification, so this now made five separate e-mails that were wasting my time.

A look at the Peak Studios website told me that they were designers, developers, and search engine marketers. Could this really be intended as a legitimate submission by someone at their office or was it just a competitor trying to make them look like imbeciles? I decided to find out.

At the end of one of the posts, it said “For more information please feel free to give us a call…” so I gave them a call in Colorado.

After a couple of questions to clarify that I was speaking to the business owner Quinn Wyss, I explained to him who we were at SEMpdx, and what had happened.

I told him that I had mentioned it on Twitter, and that I would forward him one of the offending posts so he could see for himself that his employee Jason needed some training. We left it at that, because I had to run.

A couple of hours later, I got an e-mail back from him and here’s what it said -

From: Quince Wyss : Peak Studios [mailto:quince@peakstudios.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 2:43 PM
To: ‘Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc.’
Cc: board@sempdx.org; SEMinfoPdx@sempdx.org
Subject: RE: SEMpdx forum abuse

Thanks Scott,

We fixed the typo’s. I really don’t see either of these posts as spam. One post at (url removed) isn’t “spammy”. It is informational. The only thing you might have questioned is the signature which had said www.peakstudios.com we changed it to just the user name. I took a look at your website over at searchcommander.com and understand what you may not like about the post. You do a lot of the things we warn people of. Jeremy’s understanding was that this is a forum for people to learn more about SEM.
Secondly the post Jeremy made at (url removed) was a marketing post. On http://www.sempdx.org/forum/ the link to that forum specifically states, “Local Search Marketing Jobs – “Are you looking for an SEM employee, or are you a marketer looking for a gig. Either one should feel free to post here…“. It seems to me you are asking for SEM companies to post marketing information there.
We don’t appreciate what you have posted at twitter, without the content and links to the posts your comment is very misleading. Especially without explaining there were only two posts ,that were very different.

Thanks!
Quince Wyss

Then I saw that he actually had his employee post them again with the typos cleaned up. Well, some people just don’t get it, and there’s not much I can do about that.

Rather than drill into them further in this blog post, I’ve chosen to combine both of their “submissions” into one post, and placed them on our forum in their original format where people are free to read what they wrote, and express their own opinions, and that’s where I’ll leave my personal response too.

I’ve always said that scaling up your companies SEO services was one of the hardest parts about this business, and I think this is another good example of proof.

Forum Spam is in the Eye of the Beholder is a post from: SEMpdx

Spam is content / techniques generated only for search engines and not humans in an attempt to inflate ranking. Intent / targeting is key. Look for? Page level – doing things useless for end-users. Link-level: in & out links. Deceiving end-users. Spammy behavior accounted for in rankings – can result in delisting.

SMX Seattle: Penalty Box Summit: Aaswath Raman is a post from: SEMpdx

Spam more about intent of technique and the extent a technique is used, rather than being a specific technique. Where is the fine line? Varies by industry. Is a user comfortable with the user experience of a site (excessive links, nonsensical text, etc.). Search engines can’t discose where the line is.

SMX Seattle: Penalty Box Summit: Tim Mayer is a post from: SEMpdx