I think blogging and drinking makes for a very entertaining party!

My deeper point was that sometimes people need to see spam clearly defined before they know it’s spam. There are a lot of naive people out there who would read something just as Matt has posted and believe it to be gospel from Heaven.

So what I was ultimately suggesting wasn’t so much that Matt post his comments on the spam (although they are rather entertaining), but the spam itself.

In other words, post the emails, verbatim, that these idiots generate and put them somewhere that webmasters can see. “Oh, so for $19.95 I won’t get hundreds of thousands of visitors from the Go0gle (sic) search engine.” Some people need that.

In other words, Matt, take what you’ve done here a step further. Sorry if I didn’t explain myself clearly the first time (I do that quite often…my girlfriend won’t let me speak to cashiers and store employees anymore.)

Einde dat mijn onderzoeksmotor spamming!

Sorry Matt, but I have to call you on this one…..that is simply a cop-out

First you started the subject, then the two Adams suggested some highly beneficial things that could be done to help prevent these kinds of scams from taking advantage of the unknowing and then you simply dismiss the great ideas by saying it can’t easily be done because of language differences and translation problems ?

….come on Matt, you know that is a bunch of Goobly Gook.

Matt: what if you put these comments and thoughts under the Google “Webmaster Guidelines” section where people could read them? The one problem with the Webmaster Guidelines section is that it speaks in general terms, and a lot of people just don’t get general terms because they’re too abstract.

Doing so would provide the ounce of prevention that is worth more than the pound of cure. If half of the aspiring webmasters/SEO types read in Google that these SEO tactics are wrong, then you’re not dealing with millions of reinclusion requests from naive webmasters who trusted a computer little rat (not a typo) man from Massachusetts and got taken to the cleaners.

But on a serious note, what bugs me is that you’re sort of preaching to the choir here. I’d guess 98.6% of the folks visiting your blog are SEO people or savvy geeks and such. The people who really need to get the iistgtbtipi* pounded into their heads in this context likely aren’t reading your blog.

From what I recall, Google’s Webmaster guidelines are pretty thoughtfully drawn up. But I’m wondering if there’s more that Google / Yahoo! / Microsoft etc. could do to educate small-business and aspiring small-business folks?

Some ideas:
1) Work with FTC to get a judgement against one of those spammers and make sure the case is highly publicized, complete with straightforward quotes from SEO experts about there not being any trustworthy quick fixes

2) An occasional info-blurb on G/Y/M SERPs “Want to get your site listed high… for free? Learn important dos and don’ts” or something like that which leads to perhaps a shared education campaign at an agnostic site (WebmasterTips.info or whatever).

3) Have G/Y/M public relation folks or even a G non-engineer person in his/her 20% time work with small business organizations and other groups in person and via e-mail to provide basic Webmaster / SEO education and encouragement.

These spamjerks continue to peddle their instant-rankings crap because there are enough gullible folks who want the best for their small business, but aren’t yet web savvy enough to spot related pitfalls. Foster an environment where there are fewer “suckers” and more educated Webmasters and the online world’ll be better for those Webmasters, for the search engines, and for searchers.

* iistgtbtipi = If It Sounds Too Good To Be True It Probably Is

*watches green monitors spin around my head*