Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Seattle Bike Blog :btnps: (seabikeblog@social.ridetrans.it)'s status on Thursday, 06-Feb-2025 07:48:47 JST Seattle Bike Blog :btnps:

   I get emails every day from SEO scammers, & I report them all as spam. But this one jumped out at me because it spells out the scam so clearly. They would like to give me money to publish a story they write with links to their clients' sites, but they want to make sure it is not marked as an ad.

   • Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Seattle Bike Blog :btnps: (seabikeblog@social.ridetrans.it)'s status on Thursday, 06-Feb-2025 07:48:47 JST Seattle Bike Blog :btnps:

     in reply to

     Once upon a time, Google claimed to want to stop SEO scams b/c their engineers realized that flooding search results with paid-for garbage (now mostly AI slop) would be bad for their users and the web as a whole. But then they realized that they had no real competition in search, & so long as people kept buying AdSense & AdWords ads they would make bike loads of money. So they let SEO parasites ruin search for everyone. (PS, a “bike load” is a lot. Ask your neighborhood cargo bike enthusiast)