Before I went to bed last night it looked like the nightly spam attack was in full swing at Sphinn again. This morning when I looked, I could see that it was still going on, although it seemed as if the mods had at least deleted most of it. One submission that did catch my eye was by someone whose submissions I had seen before, that I had thought were questionable back then as well, entitled “What is a keylogger good for?”:
(click to enlarge)
I started to write a comment to explain to the person why, in my opinion, his content simply wasn’t suitable for the Sphinn network. Since he wasn’t near as annoying as the rest of the spam attack going on, and since it seemed that he might be more than just a fly by spammer, I thought that perhaps some friendly advice might be all he needed.
As I continued writing, however, I realized that it was going to be a tad bit longer than I wanted to put in a comment, so…
My Open Letter To A Borderline Sphammer
Quick quiz… what use is a keylogger in internet marketing or search engine optimization? Was someone famous in the industry caught doing something they shouldn’t have through use of one? Will the massive increase in people buying them cause systemwide fluctuations in PPC prices? By reverse engineering the algorithm used to write them, can we gain deeper insights into how the search engine ranking algos work…?
Or is this simply the third piece of spam you have been able to contribute to this network?
Here’s a suggestion. You’re not one of those really annoying people who contribute pure crap here, so I’m going to try and help you. This is also (if anyone happens to read it) in my opinion a good lesson for others in a similar boat to yours (ie. don’t actually own a marketing or webmaster related website). Your site is on PC security, and the articles you have submitted so far really don’t belong on Sphinn. So, find a bridging topic. Write on that, pay special attention to the quality of those crossover pieces of work, and only submit those here. For instance, website security is very closely related to PC security, linguistically speaking. Do some serious research, and write some of the most kickass website security articles you can possibly come up with. I’m not talking about the $8 per article style of writings you have submitted so far, either… go read Neil Gaiman’s blog, and Steve Pavlina’s. Those guys can write, dammit. Write as if you were trying to impress either of them. Don’t aim for hitting all the keywords you think you need to… write from the heart.
If you can’t work up enough passion for the topic, then close your eyes, pretend you are 16 again… and that if you write this article well enough, you will get laid. Say it over and over again in your head. Make yourself believe it. See if that helps.
That would be something Sphinnable. Submit that uber-article to Sphinn… if done correctly it should in fact help you to gain links to your site. True, they will be all going to the page that doesn’t have the keyword rich content you were originally trying to get to rank… but that’s ok. Drop some links underneath the article in a “Related” manner, linking to these other writings that you have, using whatever keyword rich anchor text you like. In this way you can funnel the PageRank coming in to your site to where you want it to be.
The truth is that there are far, far more opportunities to write kickass material, and far more to write articles that are rich in the keywords you desire to rank for, than there ever will be opportunities to write kickass articles that are about the high paying keywords you are after. You simply will not be able to compose a great piece of link bait containing your money phrases every time you write. But with a well rounded site you should be able to balance out your material and still rank for whatever you need to.
On a final note… if as you read this your thought is, “But damn, that’s way more work than I want to put into it”, then fuck off. Go spam somewhere else.
Peace.
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