How Would You Feel If Someone Abused Your Website?

by John Taylor

Posted: 13 years ago 20 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Strange question? Maybe...

How would you feel if someone started to spam
your blog with affiliate links, or spammed your
forum with self promotional content? What if
they uploaded promotional videos to your site?

Would you be OK with that? Maybe you'd be
slightly irritated? Or would you get really angry?

Has it occurred to you that other people will
feel exactly the same when you abuse their sites?

Would you be surprised if they deleted your spam
comments, forum accounts, videos or other content?

So why do people think it's different when those sites
belong to Facebook, Google, Twitter, or other big
names?

Registration on a site doesn't give you the right to
do whatever you want.

Just because someone else does it doesn't mean it's
OK for you to follow suit.

Relying on any third party for a significant degree of
your traffic or income isn't the smart choice.

So, next time you add anything to someone else's
website, how about asking... "How would I feel if
someone did this on my site?"

John

#abused #feel #website

Altug

13 years ago

Good point - But I think everybodies issue isn't the fact that spammers are getting their video's deleted like they deserve to but people who actually provide value with their video's for free are being penalised.

From my personal experience, I follow a popular fitness blogger/product creator and even fitness video's with no promotion within the video are getting banned - He had over 60 video's shut down in a day with no explanation.

This isn't consistent with their terms and conditions so although some can certainly say "their house, their rules" or "How would you feel if people spammed your site?", the point is they're bringing the guillotine down on the innocent who abide by the house rules.

They need to strike the right balance (Well, they don't need to do anything..they're Google..but that would be the "right" thing to do)

Altug

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John Lenaghan

13 years ago

Originally Posted by Altug

The trouble is, it's a lot easier for them to use a wide net to get rid of the spammers, which might also catch people who aren't spamming but get caught in the net for one reason or another.

It's really no different than this:

Originally Posted by Steven Wagenheim

John, the blog spam has gotten so bad that I had to disable comments on all
my blogs.

Steven has disabled all comments because of spam, so people who want to leave legitimate comments can't do it.

Google, YouTube, etc. are bigger (I assume

) but the principles are the same.

John

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corsleymaxwell 13 years ago

Hello John!

Because they also need it!... They want to come along with your company or the other sites popularity.
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- fluffythewondercat 13 years ago
  
  Argue respective guilt and innocence all you like, but I've heard so many people protest about "unfairness" on other sites that I no longer pay attention. "Unfair" is just a synonym for "I got caught."
  
  fLufF
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  Steven Wagenheim 13 years ago
  
  John, the blog spam has gotten so bad that I had to disable comments on all
  my blogs.
  
  Pretty sad when you think about it.
  
  Unfortunately, too many people don't think about what you just asked in
  your post. Maybe if they did we'd see less of the abuse that goes on all over
  the Internet.
  
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  onyenkachikingsley 13 years ago
  
  sometimes people who does that don't even know how to do better that you, it is just a way that makes them happy but is it fair?
  
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sbucciarel Banned 13 years ago

We just had a big discussion about this and I'm in the camp that websites have the right to make or change the rules any time they see fit. I don't want Google or Twitter or Facebook telling me how to run my business and I won't tell them how to run theirs.

I hear a lot of people say, but yeah ... they're deleting valuable content along with spammers. Valuable is subjective. YOU think your ad is valuable. Most people do not.

If you ad is so valuable, why then aren't you paying to get it placed? Why build your businesses on every free site on the Net and pray to God that they will continue to provide free hosting of YOUR ads?

Build your houses on sand and sooner or later the tide will wash them away.
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Andyhenry 13 years ago

Some of the people that complain about this stuff are just deluding themselves that they were offering only good non-promotional content when in reality they only put their stuff there because some of it is promotional and generating leads and sales for their business. It's just easier to say they've been abused when they've really just been caught out. The fact that not ALL of their stuff is promotional seems to be enough for them to convince themselves they're an innocent victim.
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nothing to see here.
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Net Solutions Banned 13 years ago

Originally Posted by nana72

I will sabbath

I would be really agitated as well..Hope this does not happen again
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- Kay King 13 years ago
  
  If I have to choose, I'd prefer the outright spammer trying to "get by without getting caught" to the entitled/shocked/appalled/did-nothing-wrong/someone-should-do-something/abuse-of-power crowd.
  
  If you are abusing sites for your own gain - at least own what you are doing instead of whining when you're outed.
  
  kay
  
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Cesar Sampaio 13 years ago

The problem are the hordes of newbies who buy a BH mass posting software (some cost hundreds of $) and think they will get rich by flooding the web with crappy, blatant ads in forums and blogs.

Hint: It does not work. The only one that makes money is the scammer who sold you the program. Even if it worked there would be still millions of other guys doing exactly the same thing.

Not one of them made enough money to buy a toy replica of a Ferrari.
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- fluffythewondercat 13 years ago
  
  Ah, the irony is flowing rich this Monday morning.
  
  Cleaning out blog comments I run across an obvious Scrapebox-placed tidbit of overripe breakfast meat. The funny thing is, if this person had *actually read* the article they were trashing and responded in a way to add to the discussion, I would have happily allowed the link he spammed me with. The link was relevant. By pure accident.
  
  As it was, terminated with prejudice.
  
  fLufF
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JasonGrimes 13 years ago

That's a very true point there John, if anybody is contemplating spamming a Website really needs to step outside of the box for a moment to think how they would feel if the tables were turned.
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- wayne60618 13 years ago
  
  I have a blog in the fitness niche and get spammed every day...Usually it's scrapebox gibberish and often makes no sense. Other times, I get manual commenters who spam me...Which blows my mind. I have enabled keywordluv and want to give them a link. If they would take 1 minute to read the article they would have a decent link. Instead they post garbage. I even had a guy today take an article off his website and repost the entire thing on an unrelated topic. They not only waste my time, they waste their own too.
  
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- bretski 13 years ago
  
  I own an article directory and I regularly delete almost half of the crap that is submitted. On occasion, such as Saturday night, I will even do a "keyword delete" which deletes any articles with a particular keyword in the title, post or resource box. The results? Three keywords and over a thousand articles deleted in less than 60 seconds. Ahhhhh! I feel so fresh and clean!
  
  Blog comments don't bother me at all. I just delete them although every once in a while I'll get a sincere comment so I have no problem in giving a backlink.
  
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IMWinner 13 years ago

I would feel very offended. It takes time and much sacrifice to put up a blog. For someone to come and spam your blog for their own benefit leaves much to be desired. Unfortunately such people live within our society.
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astrutz 13 years ago

Well said John! I had a forum a couple months back, and every day I would get 50+ new topics that were spam and advertising. I tried Captchas for registering and posting, yet that still didnt work. Sooo... I decided I was sick of it and shut down my website. BUT recently i found a site called stop forum spam dot com and it will actually integrate into your website and ban all members registered on the stopforumspam database.
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- PatriciaJ 13 years ago
  
  I closed down my stop smoking forum because of the pornography and viagra spam.
  
  Today I have just finished deleting nearly 4,000 profiles from one of my sites and am just about to delete 3,400 from another of my sites. After that there will be no way in for them, but I've lost about 3 hours in time today.
  
  Every 4 minutes somebody sets a new profile up on my directories, most of them are there for the profile links and add nothing to my sites. I lose a couple of hours every week deleting those.
  
  Like Steven W I've disabled comments on some of my blogs. Like Bretski I used to spend time deleting a large amount of crap from my article directories. Now the main one is mostly on lockdown with only approved authors being able to submit.
  
  How would I feel if somebody abused my website? Like I'm not going to let the pillocks wear me down even if I have something better to do with my time than repel them.
  
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travlinguy 13 years ago

We're in the age of Spam Overdrive. People seem to love the latest backlink blasters. Sometimes I wonder if they even realize these tools actually break into Blogs and forums and drop an unintelligible post and then go and do that again, hundreds or thousands of times to other properties.

The links almost never stick, not for long at least. And we hear people saying, these are great tools if they're not abused. There is virtually no use for them other than abuse.
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