Free Internet Marketing Help

I just got done LMAO! Really, it's not that funny for some people but, I got a huge kick out of it.

NING just announced that they are cutting out Free!
Yep, you either pay for your community or GTFO!

I find it so funny simply because I know people that have spent years spamming every free NING community there is. They make a profile, fill it with links, comment on everyone else's profile with their ads, copy & paste stolen articles in the blog or forum sections (all without proper credit to the original), and they make NING a useless platform.

Then you have the lazy site admins that all they do is build more and more "communities" so they get to put all their crap on the front page and never do anything else. They want YOU to add useful content but, give nothing back but clutter up the interwebs.

I've said for awhile now that Free Communities/forums/blogs will be gone due to lazy freakin spammers....Now, we are seeing it happen.

I am happy that NING is putting their site under new law. It will make the good communities worth joining. People that pay for a site, don't let others shit in it!

The problem for everyone now is that these spammers will have to go elsewhere. That leaves us poor bloggers in the spam hole. The crap comments will multiply because most NING Spammers don't know how to do anything except copy and paste an ad.

Hey all you NING spammers that worked sooooooo hard to build a million links....kiss them Goodbye! You might want to try to actually do something worthwhile with your spare time.

You can see the NING Announcement Email Jason Rosenthal, our CEO, sent to all Ning employees

Ok, that was fun,
Sheryl

Most bloggers have a Gravatar Account and have had for quite a long time. Normally it has been used just so you can be easily identified when you leave a comment on other blogs that have Gravatar enabled.

I found out today that you can fill out a"Profile Page" with a little about yourself and links to your sites.

To fill out your Profile only takes a minute.
Log into your Gravatar.com account,
Under MY ACCOUNT click EDIT PROFILE.

Now you can put in your First and Last Name,
Your Location,
140 Character Description,
and SAVE PROFILE.

Next you can change your picture if you want.

The next section allows you to put in Links to your sites.
This will place a very small thumbnail on your profile page of the sites you add.

On the Right hand side you can add other ways for people to contact you such as...AIM,  Skype, Yahoo IM, Email, phone number...

Under that is Verified Services.
Here you can add YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Linkedin...

If you have your links handy then all of this only takes a few minutes.

How this is going to help you, I am not sure. The profiles do NOT seem to be Public YET!
It could be that they will someday do like a mouse over of your Gravatar Picture on blog comments so people can see your profile.
Maybe they will do something like BackType and post comments you made using Gravatar to your profile page.

Oh before someone screams...the links on your profile page are NoFollow. Personally, I am over it. They surely don't want to give DoFollow so every spam ass in the world fills their site with crap.

For right now...just go do your page and we will wait to see what happens. LOL!

Do you have any ideas as to what they plan to do with the new profiles?

Sheryl

I am considering writing a Comment Policy for this blog. I don’t currently have one written as I kind of thought normal people could figure it out by looking that I don’t accept everything that comes in.

I haven’t worried about writing out what will/will not pass as a comment to get posted. Most of the link spammers would not read a comment policy anymore than they would read the actual post they are commenting on.

Recently I have been getting 10-20 comments that are almost word for word the same. A set of comments will come in from the same IP, same link attached, but have different names. Do they think putting in different names will fool me?

I’m very strict on deleting any comments that are left with key words instead of a name.

I also delete the 1 or 2 sentence comments that are so general that they could be said about any post on any topic. You know the type…they are just wanting a high comment count but, add no value.

I don’t need to give anyone links that do not add value. I also do not let people advertise (leave links) on my blogs if their site is not somewhere I would ever send my readers.

Google is now looking for Link spammers!
Yes, those “people” that just leave a bunch of junk comments can be reported.
You can go to Report Link Spam
You will need to log into your Google Webmasters Account to fill out the report.
You also need to make sure that in the bottom text area you have the words “LinkSpam”.

By putting LinkSpam in the text area they know that you are reporting abusive linkers.

I am guessing that since you have to log in, Google will be able to come back on you if you are just reporting people as spammers because you don’t like them, they are competition, or if you think everything is link spam.

I will be writing a comment policy and it probably won’t be really nice. I will inform people that there is a chance that their comment may be posted with their link changed to http://lowlifespammer.com/ , the comment maybe completely deleted, or it might just get them 1 more report to Google as link spam.

Confession...Some comments are so funny that I would love to post them just to show the stupidity...that is where the Low Life Spammer link comes in. ;-)

Will any of this really cut down on the amount of spam comments? Probably not. As fast as we block them…new ones come in.

At least if I have a comment policy posted then no one can be upset when I give them the Whammy.

Sheryl