I’m about tired of getting spammed by Windows Live.

It’s the whole Black hat mentality of if I can’t compete, I’ll cheat however, the methods they are using are a couple years old. Not only are they unable to compete with Google but they are just as unable to use new black hat methods.

A couple years ago Black Hats used PrStorm to ping thousands of sites at a time, when a site was pinged, it would say that one person went to your site from [Black Hat URL here]. If the site publically publishes its referral logs (giving links to all sites that sent a ping), the black hat website would get a backlink.

Windows Live is now showing up in my referral logs saying my site is ranking for all kinds of crazy keywords on page one. Keywords like Internet, Design, Web, Website and the list goes on and on, the sad part is that my website is not ranking for those keywords.

And the problem is that my stats are becoming more and more misleading. As a matter of fact it seems that every time I make a blog post I get more of these fake referrals.

I went to look into this problem a bit and found this http://ekstreme.com/thingsofsorts/blogging/yell-if-microsofts-livecom-spammed-you-too, this http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014720.html and this http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/3424476.htm and to make it worst it would appear that this problem has been going on for a couple years now.

I guess that means it isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

If Windows Live is going to go Black Hat they really need to do a better job.

Dallas Marketing Firm

The neat thing about the internet is, it doesn’t matter where you live, you can do business anywhere in the world. I can start a marketing firm ranking business in Dallas

Texas while living in a totally different part of the world.

And there lies the problem.

People from all over the world have started search engine optimization and web marketing firms, in hopes of making some fast money online.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indexes.

The problem is that most people who are selling SEO or marketing as a service have never made money another way. Another words, they have no idea how to set your site up to convert the traffic it’s currently getting or to take advantage of all the techniques available online.

It’s not difficult to build a web page and target a term like Dallas Marketing Firm however, it’s a lot harder to build a site and target a term that’s less exciting and a lot more boring to write about.

And we also need to keep in mind that Dallas Marketing Firm is not a competitive keyword.

I guess I am saying Don’t believe anything you read on the Internet, or, for that matter, anything you hear from friends or people trying to sell you a service, unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your satisfaction. This is known as “doing your homework.”