Arizona Web Design Company Blog Spamming?
Last week I received the following comment spam plugging an Arizona web design and SEO firm called MCP Media:
Name: Shannon Light
E-mail: marketing@mcpmedia.com
URL: http://www.mcpmedia.com/search-optimization/SEO.php
IP: 202.134.119.9 (Hong Kong proxy)
Comment: MCP Media is a professional Phoenix web design company. Get free web design quotes here any time!
Now, if you visit their SEO and link building pages, you might leave thinking that this company might indeed resort to blog spamming in order to build links. They talk about the "miserable failure" Google bomb and they also spend some time explaining the impact of anchor text. All in all, the tone is fairly aggressive.
However, if you look a little closer you will come to one of two possible conclusions:
- 1. This comment was a competitor trying to sabotage their rankings
or
2. This is their very first attempt at "push button marketing" and they are completely clueless as to how to do it properly.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and go with #1.
Here’s why.
- 1. The Name - Real blog spammers understand that the only component of a comment that will always show up as a hyperlink is the name. IF MCP Media was actually responsible for this comment, they probably would have use Arizona SEO (the phrase the url listed is optimized for) instead of Shannon Light. On the other hand, a competitor doesn’t want to risk actually helping the site they are spamming to rank, so they tend to use names they think few people will actually search for.
2. MCP Media’s Current Rankings - They already rank well across all engines for the phrase "Arizona SEO." That being the case, why on earth would they waste time on a blog campaign?
3. The Comment Copy - Real blog spammers also understand that many blogs allow html in the comment copy. If MCP Media was actually trying to promote their services, the comment should have looked like this:
MCP Media is a professional Phoenix web design company. Get free web design quotes here any time!
4. Their Domain Registrar - My only criticism of MCP Media is that the fact that they use GoDaddy as their domain registrar. GoDaddy is the biggest piece of shit company (and yes, I mean even bigger than NSI) in the entire domain industry. They are pieces of shit because they have a policy of turning sites off when they get spam complaints. After the site is turned off, they force the site owner to pay a $200.00 fee in order to get the site restored.
They do this without any type of evidence that the owner of the site was actually responsible for the reported spam. That means that if I were your typical "spam nazi" blogger, I would have gone straight to GoDaddy and reported the spam. And doing that, would have probably resulted in MCP Media’s site getting shut down.
But I’m smarter than that. I know competitive sabotage when I see it. And all you hard-core bloggers should take the time to learn what it looks like, because it’s going to be quite popular in 2006.
Comments
9 Responses to “ Arizona Web Design Company Blog Spamming? ”
Got something to say?
since you think GoDaddy is a piece of shit registrar who do you like?
Moniker of course.
gandi is pretty good. Foreign, but reasonable and no hassles.
What makes Moniker so special that I would prepay $1000 just to get semi-competitive pricing? I mean the question seriously. Thanks!
2006 is definitely going to be the year of sabotage. Seems one of my competitors just hired a guy to create thousands of blogspot blogs linking to my homepage. I imagine a round of comment spam is next.
At least they were trying something somewhat current
Greg - Have you seen (or had) a site banned for blog spamming? The latest from the Cutts camp is that it doesn’t help your rankings, but that it can’t can’t hurt them. Would you like to share a specific example otherwise?
Yikes! I have all my domains at godaddy - I’m definitely moving them. How would I find out a registrar’s policy on spam complaints?
Why don’t just ask the guy?
[...] In my last post on competitive sabotage, I mentioned that using GoDaddy wasn’t a smart idea because of their asinine stance on spam reports. That brief comment caused several GoDaddy users to email me asking for some more information regarding GoDaddy’s spam policies [...]