The SEO Spammers Behind Online Infographics 55
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."
Misleading title on original article (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm I read the article, and other than the author being pretty obtuse, I don't see any substantial connection with infographics.
The author operates a blog, and was contacted by someone trying to operate a suspicious link-trading scheme. He engaged them to find out info the SEO scheme was directing traffic to a lead-generation system for online degrees.
End of story.
Anyone who operates a website has gotten spam about link trading schemes like this one. Nothing in here is specifically targeted to infographics.
High-quality infographics? (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't seen one that had any value, they are just a way of using shiny pics to spread ignorance while appearing smart because they have numbers on 'em.
Re:Misleading title on original article (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.
Getting a site destroyed by /. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.
Unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case the site exists to connect people who are looking to go to college with colleges who want the money. This is no different than your average bank who will not only sell your name to a fraudsters, but allow them to put the bank logo on correspondence and then claim they have nothing to do with the offer.
In fact it is not the site who are like the banks, but the schools. They are the ones soliciting for others to attract clients using whatever mean necessary. The school have a choice of who they pay for fulfillment. They could simply say if anyone complains about fraud, they will not pay for fulfillment. Yet the don't. They knowingly engage in supporting whatever fraud may exist.
Which is not surprising. School like Phoenix exists to con young people into applying to student loans, taking that money.and giving much less than what would expect from a minimum education. National average default rate is around 14%, University of Phoenix has twice that. The cost of an associates degree is at least 25K, while most community colleges are half that.
If there is a story here it is that some schools have engaged in fraud, promoted fraud, solicited fraud, and destroyed young peoples lives all to steal a few dollars from the US taxpayers.
Re:Golly - The internets are a' changin'! (Score:2, Insightful)
You have aged (as we all are). I ran a BBS on phone lines in the 1980's up until 1990 when my work over took my hobby. It was fun. It was somewhat personal. It was a great hobby!
You have to accept a certain amount of "change". I pine for the "good old days" when I was in my 20's and 30's and had a dick as hard as a rock (and the gals always "approved" of the size {length *and* width}). In fact, my current GF of almost 8 years now is a gal whose husband died. She and I screwed around so many years ago. When her husband died she got in touch with me and I was unattached and she fucked me the first night she "stopped over to say hi". A couple years later she admitted she liked fucking me so much years ago that if only to "satisfy her desires" she made sure I fucked her that night. We've been "fuck buddies" for almost 8 years now. She stays here from Friday evening to Sunday morning every week, and she still comments on how "big" I am. I know she's lying (it was back then, but it isn't these days - And I refuse to take "boner" pills). But those days are long gone. I'm 62, over weight, and understand I can't pick up late teens and early 20's gals in bars any more, if only because I'm not "rich" which significantly changes things... Life is a bitch. The internet is no different, except it's happening faster and faster every year.
As to politics - Yeah. It has always been bad but these days - Well, I just keep out of expressing political views for the most part. I'm getting too old to care.
As to Salon, I gave it up years ago although I generally stop by every month or so as is the case with many web sites I used to visit regularly (You should see my bookmarks - Many go back to the mid and late 1990's). I look at politics this way - There days it's theatrics and greed to the max. It always has been to some extent, but the internet has definitely changed things for the worse *and* for the better, just as cell phones with video and cameras have. . I'm old enough to know one can not win political or religious discussions so I stay out of them. On the other hand, I don't give a rats ass if I do post something and I'm ripped up. That's the way open public forums are.
Now if you want to want to read about science and tech stories, the internet is one hell of a lot bigger than it was even 5 years ago. Search and ye shall find. From Scientific American to PBS - From the TED talks to Ars. There is so much online these days that it's hard not to be able to find sites that fit your expectations.
I don't mind what I see as the eventual demise of /. - And I can say the same about some other sites. It's simply move on. No one can stop what is essentially the evolution of the internet. Just as the Gutenberg press totally fucked the dark ages, and how Faux news changed real, unbiased new programs (Cronkite, Murrow, et al) to "Infotainment", the internet is an information distribution system which has changed the world so dramatically that many things will never be the same.
As a last thought - Now and again there are some excellent discussions here on /. Yes, it's harder to weed out the crap from the good stuff, but it's there. You just have to work harder to weed out the crap. Allowing anonymous posts doesn't help things. If I owned /. the first thing I would do would be to eliminate anonymous posts. If a person can't "own up" to what they post they shouldn't be allowed to post.
Infographics are rubbish anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly it's PR companies [davidgerard.co.uk].
Tom Morris outlines the problem: Infographics are porn without the happy ending [tommorris.org].