Posts Tagged ‘spam’

Posted on January 29, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Google search algorithm changed with more focus on original content

Yesterday Matt Cutts posted that Google has changed their search algorithm to focus more on original content. Below is an excerpt from his post:

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Matt’s post summary is the short version from his post on Google’s offical blog entitled “Google search and search engine spam“. This is great news as it seems like the beginning of Google trying to remain the #1 search enginge and fight off what seems like a series of attacks and competition from new search engines and startups such as Wolframalpha, Blekko and the continue traffic increase of Microsoft Bing.

Note, Matt stated that the Google search algorithm change will only affect 2% of search queries but don’t let the small number fool you. Google is under fire about providing relevant content to the answers of search quires and startups like Quora does.

My recommendation for you is to keep providing good, original content and for Google to keep updating their search algorithm or keep buying startups that are answering the questions that people use to search Google for.

Posted on December 16, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

No, I Will Not Help Your Business Spam People on Twitter

Photo via: http://stopautodm.com/

Twitter: the little platform that does it all; from marketing, to customer service and sadly, massive amounts of spam. The Twitter platform itself, doesn’t spam, but with various tools using Twitter’s API can allow people to use it for spamming with public tweets and direct messages (DMs). Spam is nothing new in the digital world, we receive millions of spam every day in our email inboxes and it’s an ongoing problem with Twitter. But with recent UI changes and updates, Twitter spam has seemed to decrease.

My LinkedIn inbox saw an unfortunate occurrence this week. I received a message from someone asking if I could help them with something that I not only consider spamming on Twitter but also to find the best tool to automate the process of creating a Twitter account for business purposes. Here’s a screenshot of the LinkedIn message. Some information has been grayed out to protect the guilty.

The individual basically wanted to launch a Twitter marketing strategy the following ways:

1. auto follow targeted people
2. Send auto DM’s
3. Target followers by region
4. Auto or easily unfollow users who do not follow back

Now I will confess and say that I have used various tools myself and for others to auto follow people on Twitter by location and keyword but I have NEVER pulled an auto-follow and then unfollow just for subscribers. Also I have NEVER sent Auto DMs to my followers or any Twitter account that I have managed. My response to this person was “Hello, thanks for contacting me, yes there is software that will allow you to reach your goals but it’s a practice that I do not recommend or suggest to others using Twitter.”

As more businesses continue to use Twitter for marketing and more social media practitioners are born every day, I hope this is not a sign of the times, as we move into 2010, of businesses who are looking to implement Twitter as a part of their existing marketing efforts. Maybe I’m being a little hard, but as you can see, this person is a consultant for a client and that brings me to another point. Yes, social media is about sharing and you can find a lot of free help online including Twitter itself. But if you’re working for a business or if you’re a business and would like consulting, that’s something I do at Twine Interactive and we can setup a conference call or a strategy session so you can get the best value out of your time and money. But to the person who sent me the LinkedIn message: if you find this blog post, there is a Twitter app store called OneForty.com

Reference link: Twitter 101 Advice for Companies: “Don’t spam people”

*Disclaimer: I have no business investment with OneForty.com

How are you using Twitter for business?

Posted on November 18, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Is it time for Twitter to kill Trending Topics?

Since Twitter has “jumped the shark” from earlier this year, trending topics seem to have less value than ever. Random tends such as #blackthoughts and #whitethoughts which are trending one and two now are more about jokes, free will expression and spam, than sharing or posting valuable content. Also besides the spammers, some “Trending Topic seekers” are tweeting things that really should never be said online, ever. Recently Brian Solis of FutureWorks wrote, Do Twitter’s Trending Topics Signify What’s Important to You?. My answer in the comments was no. Also I stated that Twitter could use services like topsy.com, bit.ly or Tweetmeme to better filter trending topics based on links or tweets that I have tweeted based off of their api. Also with the new geo api Twitter could show me Trending Topics not only by what I have previously tweeted but by location and popular tweet content near by.

Personally at the current state of Trending Topics and with the growth of new Twitter users I think Twitter should stop displaying Trending Topics until they can make it more valuable. Also I’ve heard from many individuals say they don’t even look at or use Trending Topics anymore or care about Trending Topics for that matter.

Twitter though is acknowledging the Trending Topics problem on a recent blog post called: Get to the Point: Twitter Trends. Post excerpt:
As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation.

So, today we’re starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.

Good luck with improving Trending Topics but unlike the list and retweet roll-out, I think Twitter should hide Trending Topics everywhere on the site until it’s fixed.

Your Thoughts or Take the Poll below?

Posted on September 4, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

War has been declared on Twitter Auto DM and DM spam. SocialToo vs Don't let it be you!

Ok, if you don’t know my by now there’s two things we hate about Twitter and/or the way people use Twitter. One is just Twitter spam bots in general and the other is auto direct messages. That’s right folks Auto DMs are bad no matter if it’s a simple “hello thanks for following me” or a “please verify your account”. Most people don’t like auto dms and as of recently two initiatives have launched to help rid the Twitter world of Auto DMs.

The first I found via TechCrunch blog post called StopAutoDM: A Movement to Stop Auto DM’s

The second is a new feature launched yesterday from SocialToo. SocialToo now offers a direct message spam filtering service and has officially declared war on Twitter spam. For more on SocialToo’s features you can read the initial blog post release here: SocialToo Extends War on Twitter Spam With One-Click DM Management or Louis Gray’s blog post recap here: SocialToo Extends Battle Against Twitter DM Spam With New Feature You can follow SocialToo on twitter as @Socialtoo

I think the score is now Spam 1, SocialToo 1. Do you use a service to block auto dms and Twitter spam?

Posted on September 4, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Friday Fix: 4 ways to add a retweet button to your WordPress blog

4 ways to add a Retweet button to your WordPress blog.

Tweetcount Plugin from BackType:
http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount

The TweetMeme retweet button; http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button

ReTweet.com’s Official Retweet Button – http://retweet.com/button

Easy ReTweet WordPress Plugin – http://sudarmuthu.com/wordpress/easy-retweet