Over the course of the past 48 hours, one continuous message was almost a centre of discussion at the SESTO show which has recently wrapped up in Toronto was the elimination of spam in search.

The other day I got to see “doorway page” spam at work. I was on a conference call and was fielding some questions about search engine optimization with a potential client of ours at Ulistic. This client has an older site laced with hundreds of links in the footer of their main corporate site and is reluctant to remove them. He believes they work and my guess is some inexperienced SEO guru told him this is what he needs to do in order to succeed online.

Well, nothing is further from the truth in today’s search world. Those links at the bottom of your page are not scoring high in the Google world and they may be flagged as spam and will potentially harm your overall page ranking. Driving off page one instead of keeping you at the top.

What works? This list is quite a lengthy one but I will touch on just a couple of examples right now:

Keyword Rich Content – I preach about then importance of balance of design and content. Your website needs to work for the reader and for Google. Balancing the design of your site with well-written and keyword rich copy is crucial to attract qualified prospects from the search engines.

Be personable – This point is very important. You need to be personable online. Blogs and social media are wonderful ways your business can “have a face” online. Using Facebook, Twitter, video and blogs are key important personable tools all business must embrace.

There is more to life than self-serving links, especially spam-filled self-serving links…this is from the horse’s mouth and was shared with us SEO professionals at the Search Engine Strategies show in Toronto. Stop the cycle of pages filled with spam.

Get personable and educated your followers. Share your insight and share your knowledge and you just may rise to the top of the table.

My company Ulistic works with business across Canada understand SEO, social media and the importance of doing business online today. Give us a ring at 403.775.2205 with any questions you may have.

Yep, the number of emails I get daily now since I made the move from a Calgary Small Business Computer Consultant to my new gig working with the business community in Calgary helping many small to midsize corporations with online marketing, social media strategies and search engine optimization have drastically increased.

So no, I don’t want to exchange your garbage links with you! Just because my clients have great page rank doesn’t allow you to spam me asking to exchange links.  That is so 1999 of you.  It simply never works out to be a fair trade anyways.

Go out there and earn your links the right way.  Offer real information that people would love to share, blog about or retweet…but don’t email me asking for a link from my website to yours.  The answer is NO, if you even get an answer from me.

Have you heard of Jeremy Epstein?  I don’t believe he is related to Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein at all?  Actually this Epstein is a fictitious character.   Besides being a handsome man, Jeremy Epstein is a pretty savvy Marketer from the DC area.

Jeremy shared a very interesting story of link spam showing up in his blog the other day and where it came from and who was doing it.  A while back, I was getting a tonne of link spam as well when I installed the IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin.  Stay clear of this plugin all of you WordPress bloggers, total trash and full of spammers who surely increase your comment count but not in a good way.

Jeremy shared a story about four firms who are paying some SEO firm in North Carolina to do SEO work for them.  According to Jeremy’s blog post this SEO firm employs blog commenting and linking tactics aimed to get a higher number of inbound links to their client’s websites.  First off, what about the NOFOLLOW tag Google put in place a while back designed to combat this type of behaviour?  A good SEO firm would understand this loophole has been closed quite sometime ago and link comments don’t work anymore.

Jeremy shared the names of these four firms on his blog post. But I will say this.  There are some SEO firms out there who wound rather take their clients money and run.   I wonder if these four business are even aware that the behaviours of their SEO firm just got them blogged about by my Washington, DC friend.

Question…how do you know what your SEO firm is doing out there?  This is why we are teaching our clients how to do their Calgary SEO work and our approach of education will help your business stay clear of this sort of junk that happens out there.

Buyer beware comes to mind, how are you going to employ your next search engine optimization firm?

Read the complete post from Jeremy here.

Jeremy shared a very interesting story of link spam showing up in his blog the other day and where it came from and who was doing it.  A while back, I was getting a tonne of link spam as well when I installed the IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin.  Stay clear of this plugin all of you WordPress bloggers, total trash and full of spammers who surely increase your comment count but not in a good way.

Jeremy shared a story about four firms who are paying some SEO firm in North Carolina to do SEO work for them.  According to Jeremy’s blog post this SEO firm employs blog commenting and linking tactics aimed to get a higher number of inbound links to their client’s websites.  First off, what about the NOFOLLOW tag Google put in place a while back designed to combat this type of behaviour?  A good SEO firm would understand this loophole has been closed quite sometime ago and link comments don’t work anymore.

Jeremy shared the names of these four firms on his blog post. But I will say this.  There are some SEO firms out there who wound rather take their clients money and run.   I wonder if these four business are even aware that the behaviours of their SEO firm just got them blogged about by my Washington, DC friend.

Question…how do you know what your SEO firm is doing out there?  This is why we are teaching our clients how to do their Calgary SEO work and our approach of education will help your business stay clear of this sort of junk that happens out there.

Buyer beware comes to mind, how are you going to employ your next search engine optimization firm?

Read the complete post from Jeremy here.

Now today, I understand social media services are designed to share ideas, concepts, offer advice but not to aggressively sell or spam those around us.  This happened twice to meetup.com groups in Calgary which David (my partner at Ulistic) and I are members of.  One was for a “self-claimed” SEO expert in Calgary and the other a “sort of” business coach.

In my review of successful business people in Calgary, they simple don’t do this stuff.  So my only conclusion is that if Ulistic wants to be a truly successful SEO and Social Media firm we need to practice the behaviours of those who we look up too, not those who we look down on.

Meetup.com idea feature being hit by spammers in Calgary

Recently meetup.com, one of the leading social networking sites which encourage online networking with traditional face-to-face networking added some new skins, designs and functionality with the introduction of some new features.  Meetup.com is a wonderful tool to bring people together who have similar interests, share ideas and for us business-focused people learn and share our business stories.

One of these new features is called “ideas”.  Not a bad thing for group members to share ideas and concepts however when some awesome functionality is added the spammers also can take advantage of something which is meant for the overall good.  Over the past couple of days some so-called Calgary Internet Marketers have started spammy activities these new lists on meetup.com.

David and I run two very successful meetup groups in Calgary focused on the entrepreneur community and also a good group committed on bringing together information technology professionals together. The Calgary Entrepreneur and Business Professionals Group and also Tech Brew Calgary are now in full swing.  Unfortunately because of these spam activities we have been forced to restrict access by approving new members until everyone is confirmed as a legitimate businesses.

G0od thing these so-called professionals haven’t found our LinkedIn groups yet.