The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics

jfruh writes "Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed a rash of often high-quality infographics by third parties appearing on your favorite websites. These images are offered to Web publishers free of charge, with the only request being a link back to the creator's own site. But when one blogger got an odd email from a the creator of infographic he put on his site two years ago, he did some digging and discovered that he had inadvertently helped some shady characters do SEO spamming."

Re:Misleading title on original article

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like the source of that infographic was the bogus info-farming online school site, and they wanted the links updated.

It also sounds like they produce hundreds of these infographics and expects to be backlinked. I'm not sure that qualifies as a scam, but it's in a grey area for SEO.

Yes, it's their content. Yes, it's fair to request attribution from blogs reposting your info. But using that popular content to boost the search engine rank of your unrelated infofarm? Kinda lame.

Golly - The internets are a' changin'!

[Cheech Wizard]

The whole internet is changing (for the worse in my opinion). Even Google - Once an excellent Search Engine, now not so much. Even places like Webmasterworld aren't what they used to be. Facebook idiots and corporations are taking over. Get used to it. As to politics, yeah - The "interwebs" have changed that, too. Remember it wasn't so many years ago home computers were not particularly common so discussions on boards like /. were more "professional" (for lack of a better word off hand). These days every idiot has at least one computer. I run forums and these days even a lot of old timers who stayed around and monitored, and participated in, the forums are spending much of their time on Facebook or LinkedIn or Google+ rather than hanging around the forums. Slashdot is still one of my "daily check-in" sites. Admittedly these days I usually just scan the headlines, but now and again I drop into a thread (like this one) and read it or some of it. As to commenting in threads, I'm not typically into it posting and never have been even though I keep some forums online. --> My 2 cents