Online Marketing Blog

I haven’t had the chance to write about any “dark side” social media stuff in a loooooong time. But today I caught wind of “Subvert and Profit” (blog) and they make no bones about their intentions. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

“Content-pushers and social bookmarkers rejoice! The democracy of web 2.0 is about to get a major dose of capitalism as the crowdsourcing revolution begins. This revolution will bring you money, should you choose to embrace it. Subvert and Profit, our brand new site, is leading the charge.”

Everyone in the search marketing biz is pretty familiar with automated emails soliciting link requests as well as those for reciprocal link exchanges. Normally, anything that makes it past my spam filter that alludes to some kind of link request just gets the big “D” for delete.

I received one this morning that was pretty interesting though. It was a solicitation to exchange articles, not just links. I guess those reciprocal link schemes are trying to appear more legitimate by using links within content.

Dear Webmaster,
I handle article exchange program for my client, www.spammy-hypenated-domain-name-here.com

Chris Pirillo and Jake hit up Search Engine Strategies New York and did a number of interviews which you can hear at his SES 2006 Archive page. Interviewees include:

• Copernic on Desktop Search
• David Sifry on Technorati and Entreprenuership
• Lee Odden on Blogs and Search Marketing (More “umms” and “ahhs” than you’ve ever heard in one conversation!”
• Jay Budzik of Intellext on Watson Contextual Search
• Jim Lanzone of Ask.com on Search
• Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg of Reprise Media on Contextual Advertising
• Danny Sullivan on SES, Tags and Googlefasting

Chris Pirillo gets the goods on search engine spam with an interview of an anonymous “search spammer” at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. The voice is decidedly European, possibly German - yes, it’s German.

“At SES Chris interviewed one search spammer who asked to remain nameless while providing some interesting details about the inner workings of the search spamming world. On one hand the interview reveals some of the motivations for spamming the search engines. More interesting are the search spamming tactics these black hat marketers won’t employ because even they are annoyed by the end result.”