I think my general distaste for spammers is one of the better known items on the internet. From email, to comments, to social networks, I have little tolerance for those types of poisonous marketing. I typically even go as to sniff out and publish the personal information of repeat offenders. It’s not that I dislike marketing or even advertising, I just dislike people who do it poorly.
That being said, right here on my little ol’ website, I’ve noticed something that’s happened not once, but twice. It’s a new type of comment spam, and I have to say, I hesitantly approve. Here’s a link to the comments in question.
At first glance they appear to be genuine, human written comments. They relate to the material in question even though the material in question is old. The comments even come from verified Disqus (the software I use for my comment system) accounts. The only way you can tell that they’re quasi-spam is that the username is what SEO-types call keyword anchor text.
The idea behind commenting with anchor text is that with enough comments, Google will associate the terms in the link to the webpage that it’s pointing to. Back in the day, we called that Googlebombing and it is how one unfortunate writer was the #1 result for “talentless hack” and a certain President was ranked #1 for incompetent.
But wait, there’s a catch. As this was popular as an automated technique years ago, most blog comment programs add a small “nofollow” tag to comment links. The effect of this tag is that the link has no value to Google.
Click for visual aide
Beyond that, these commenters are leaving comments on posts that are months old, which essentially negates the chances of a human stumbling upon them and blindly clicking through.
The really strange thing is this – I’m not deleting the comments. Why? Have I gone soft and developed a love for BlackHat SEO done wrong? Nope. I’m not deleting these spam comments because they actually help me. You see, everytime someone with a Disqus account leaves a comment on my site, Disqus creates a followable link on the commenters page. This means while the comments don’t help the spammer, they do help me, if only a little bit.
And that’s the kind of spam I can live with.
Near the start of this year, I had come up with a couple of ideas, large, expansive, and incredibly labor-intensive ideas that I wanted to contribute to the greater writing community.
However, I kept bumping into the fact that while these ideas are really good, they didn’t quite fit on a personal domain where I wanted the freedom to riff on the latest episodes of television or vent about things I found on the internet. Putting those ideas here would muddle their inherent value, dragging emphasis away from the niche, and creating confusion for readers.
Compound that fact with the pure amount of industry watching I’ve been doing over the past few months, and searching, largely in vain, for a centralized website that caters to fiction writers the way that CopyBlogger caters to freelancers, and I saw a definite need.
After talking with a few friends and about the idea, I decided to make the leap. So, on February 18th, I grabbed another domain name and started outlining ideas. Within a few days, the general idea had started to take shape, and I was putting up the first of the content, as my Twitter friends have likely noticed.
For the name, I’m going with Fiction Matters. I couldn’t believe that the domain was free. I think it’s a great play on words – a statement about the importance of fiction, and a statement on the site’s content.
The method is to leverage the entirety of the knowledge that I’ve learned about blogging, from being a journalist, from my experience writing fiction, and from my experience writing many company blogs and working in SEO. To that end, it’s kind of a culmination of knowledge related to both writing and the web.
The goal? Well, that’s to create a solid resource for fiction writers, which I believe will only become more numerous as our current economic crisis pairs itself with the decrease in the barriers towards becoming a fiction writer.
What to expect from Fiction Matters
Tips – In addition to writing tips, I plan on addressing tips for being a writer, tackling the business and promotional aspects which are only going to be become more important to writers in the new age of publishing.
Tools – Technology is increasingly expanding the methods and options that writers have at our disposal. I’d like to address those.
News – It’s important to know what’s going on in the industry. And news comes from many, many sources. I plan to accumulate all of those into one easy to find location.
Resources – I’ve been slowly assembling a compendium of knowledge which addresses the myriad needs of the fiction writer. From a database of industry people and where to find them online to a dictionary that addresses the plethora of writers terms. The goal is to put it all online and make it all searchable.
Community – This one depends on others. Writing is a lonely art, and talking with other writers is a boon. It’s my hope that when the first four pieces come into place, the fifth will evolve organically.
Call to Action
Yes, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get everything off the ground. The upshot is that once everything is up there and active, Fiction Matters will be a very valuable resource for those who love fiction. Please let me know if you’re interested in contributing in any way.
If you’re like me, you get a lot of Twitter Spam followers pitching scams and schemes. I’m finally to the point where I don’t want to have my inbox bombarded a half dozen or more times a day by these type of follower emails. So, I have a letter which I’ve submitted to the Twitter Help desk asking them to make two small changes to the registration process which will stifle automated spamming systems like TweetTornado.
Feel free to submit this letter or write your own. The Twitter Support page can be found here.
Dear Twitter Staff,
Due to the automation of Twitter Spam accounts through products like TweetTornado, I feel it’s in the best interest of both Twitter and the service’s users to enact two changes to registration process to hamper bulk registrations while still allowing legitimate users to register with ease.
The first such act would be to include a CAPTCHA. A solid CAPTCHA can reduce automated signups by 85%.
The second act would be the interrupt the signup process by enacting email verification. This is a more cumbersome task, which adds time to the process, but also puts the requirement of having an actual email address on those who which to create mass accounts.
I appreciate the quick response that Twitter takes to identify and suspend spam accounts, however, the number of spammers is rising, and a more proactive approach would be much appreciated. Thank you for your understanding.
[Name]
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.