Ok it’s been a good while since there was any numpty-bashing here but a new target has loomed large on the radar over the last few weeks. Introducing ABC Spammings
We, like most SEOs or webmasters with any clue, monitor Google alerts on certain terms or words we’re interested in, and it’s not until you do, that you realise the volume of content theft that just goes on blatantly, and constantly.
In the last few weeks we’ve started seeing lots of our content snippets turning up in Google alerts that look like this.
When you click the link you though, you get a HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden error.
..hmm.. cloaking maybe? 
..After about ten of these, on such delightfully spammy .info URLs as:
http://my-internetmarketingbusiness-guides.info/seo-company-spain
http://ineedtomakemoneyonline.the-internetmarketingpricing-hub.info/superior-search-engine-optimisation
..We got curious enough to do a site: search and look in the cache. – Nasty spammy auto-generated nonsense ripping text from our site and plenty of others besides. Now as yet none of this is uncommon, spammers do this all the time, but what is uncommon is that most of said spammers don’t register their spam domains under their “real” business domain, however this one…
..looks like they might have..
A quick visit to their site shows that there’s not much doubt it’s them, because their “SEO services” seem to consist solely of building blog and forum link “link networks” (Spam) for clients.
This example from the front of their site
..is identical in style and nonsense as the offending cache page above.
..and despite repeated emails and attempted contact through their contact form ABC Spammings are are completely ignoring us, and so using the power of SEO we’re now going to make sure that they, and any potential customers they might have, can’t ignore us much longer.
SO ABC RANKINGS – what you do is your choice, even though you are building and selling utter spam networks of the lowest quality, that’s your call, what is unacceptable however is that you turn your automated content spinners loose on sites who care about their online reputation and pollute our name in your filth.
What if one of our customers should chance upon it and think its anything to do with us?
This blog post is now going to be promoted until there’s a big long line of people laughing at your nonsense, and only when every mention of us, any of our content, or any other of the SEO sites you’ve ripped in fact is gone, might we remove it from right underneath you for your own name.
If any potential customers of ABC Rankings should read this, we would advise you to think VERY carefully before getting involved in this type of nonsense, you might well end up ruining your sites chances of ever ranking well.
Our advice? … STEER WELL CLEAR OF THESE JOKERS.
Have a good day now
Mar 15th – update on this is that instead of just saying
“sorry, we’ve stopped and we won’t do it again..”
they seem to have employed a genius US-based troll (language skills required presumably) to come and start anonymous trouble here instead..
Mar 25th Update
The Power of SEO wins again, they’ve deleted their website and links to some of their network have started showing up as broken as well.. ..Run away, run away!! Lol, you didn’t have to do that, (although as a business its not exactly viable) all you had to do was stop spinning our content. Muppets.
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I had a dig around the network, its pretty nasty. you cant help wondering about the poor suckers who pay for this shit, who would want Google associating them with crap like that?
..Not I.
They replied to the original email this morning denying it was them.
“someone is spoofing our email address on whois”
yea right, I suppose they’re building the same spam networks as you show (and sell) on the front of your website to make you look bad?
yea course they are…
LOL! yes well, there’s linkwheels and there’s spamwheels isnt there? Linkwheels work quite well as long as you make them nice, with decent original content that can stand up to human visitors ok.
How about a nice drawing of a SpamWheel for them to aid in their sales process?
haha, now there’s an idea for a blogpost…
why the cheeky buggers…. I have been considering stealing my own content back from my copy writing days and changing the links to benefit my current clients… how does that sound?
HW Dave
Sigh. Where do these guys come from? I recently found 3 articles that I wrote for a company I used to work for that had strangely appeared on the boss’s personal website? With his name at the bottom. Some people just dont have the intellectual capacity to know the industry. God it isnt rocket science to do your work properly is it?
To these people, longevity means nothing!
I have never come across this sort of think before, if they are stealing your content can you not take some legal action? Or at very least a letter on legal header paper, how about Legal Ibiza ?
Nobby
Lol Matt, yes I remember that, what happened with that?
@ Nobby, no there’s not much you can do except get maybe their network nuked by Google spam reporting it, and / or report them to their host and maybe get them taken down.
Id rather deal with them ourselves, shine a little public light on them usually embarrasses them into a hasty retreat.
Yeah, aren’t their host legally responsible if the content on their site is illegal in some way?
I can see why you’ve dealt with it in this way though.
James
Yes they are, but although we threatened Goog spam reports & their hosting company in the original emails, ultimately we wouldn’t do that until absolutely necessary.
its often better to put something like this up to embarrass them, and it may even earn us a few links along the way..
What follows now is the comment trail between us and what turned out to be a poorly disguised “representative” of ABC Rankings.
It originally started as anonymous trolling, but Woopra soon busted them and we stopped being polite after that
Amateur 14, March, 2010 at 11:44 am
(On behalf of ABC Rankings)
seoibiza 14, March, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Haha – a bit of spirited commenting, that’s more like it.
hello Washington USA, & thanks for your interest, your vote of confidence, and link opportunity to a mate’s post about what is actually involved before you can legitimately call yourself an SEO expert
Yes actually you are correct in that we really should have updated this post ages ago, because on the day of publication, Joe Stepnowski – a director at Skimlinks contacted us directly and informed us how it works and what the aim was.
And as we don’t use WordPress hosted blogs for SEO link purposes it was only of limited interest to us anyway, so having “discovered” (as in first to publish) this we were happy to leave further investigations to parties more interested than us, ..the moment passed, and we never got round to updating this post to reflect that, apologies for that.
On the other hand an adjusted title to reflect that, probably wouldn’t gather nearly as much Google interest as this post has since then either would it..?
We now have two different clients running Skimlinks and it seems to be a really good product.
So in summary, yes you are correct, WordPress links are still seen live inside Google WMT panels and still pass PR.
perhaps you can leave some more comments that start with abuse on some of our other posts? ..it’s always good to start the morning with a chuckle.
Regards from Ibiza
Amateur 14, March, 2010 at 9:10 pm
(On behalf of ABC Rankings)
< snip > blah blah blah I’m so great, you’re so shit,vague threats about irrelevant nonsense and Goog spam reports.. yada yada yada, < /snip >
SEO Ibiza say
Listen numpty, not sure what rattled your cage exactly, one of our clients outranking you are they?
I’m more than happy to have a full and frank conversation with you here, but not as an anonymous sniping numpty.
man up, identify yourself, and some of your work, and then we can talk. ..but you won’t will you?
..because despite your utter (undiscovered) brilliance you are still just an anonymous little web-geek, and that is all you’re ever destined to be.
good luck with that, but we wont be taking anonymous abuse from someone with so little clue about pagerank or nofollow.
Amateur 15, March, 2010 at 1:26 am
On behalf of ABC Rankings
< snip seoibiza summarize > more anonymous lame witterings – “I reported your client and mess with me I’ll report some more, I’m so tough.. < snip >
SEO Ibiza say
actually the last laugh f*ckwit, is that the site youre blathering on about never actually became our customers, and that set up has NOTHING to do with us. check the whois on the site, it was built 5 years before we started in business.
we were contacted and contracted to do some on-site work for their replacement website rebuild, but it went on hold in 2008 and nothing (beyond a few title changes while we waited) on the site you see ever happened. (look in the Internet Archive)
I actually agree with you on this, but it was likely one of your webbie amateur genius mates that built it.
..and you don’t think all their competitors have reported them 100 times over in the last 8 years?
how naive. amateur is about right, you’re not really all that bright are you?
and having told them at the time that they were at risk from their current structure, if they finally got nuked, who do you think they’d call?
and while we’re on the subject of IQ, according to Woopra you’re also connected with ABC Spammings?
now your attitude and agenda makes perfect sense.
tell your spammer mates to stop using our content in their spam networks, when they tell us they’ve removed it ALL and they wont be spinning our content anymore, then we’ll remove the post.
and in the meantime you need to get yourself a life we’ve dealt with better six-year old trolls than you, seriously.
lastly, don’t think we can’t find you and your “sites” we already did
Amateur 15, March, 2010 at 3:36 pm
seoibiza 15, March, 2010 at 3:43 pm
It hasnt been a laugh, it was dull.
and there are no paid links to report you dimwit, we have never bought a link, ever. for our clients or ourselves. do you think we would be so upfront about things if we had stuff to hide?
and I told you the rules, you only get an uninterrupted voice if you talk as yourself, so shut your anonymous whining.
as for the site being PR grey, you give your ignorance away more with every word, the site was rebuilt 5 weeks ago, and is in the process of being redirected into an inner directory: /company/ using only 301’s : brainache
and your fixation on Pagerank (checkpagerank.net
– “amateur” is definitely right) belies your spamming background/s
bye bye muppet.
It’s an absolute joke to be honest with you. There are always going to be the bottom of the barrel scum that copies and passes it off as there own content. If only Google was clever enough to recognize the blatant ripped off garbage content and have it removed from there engines entirely..