Spam on the forum - some consolation

Apologies to the mods as the only link to C2 is that this might improve the C2 community's morale. No links or anything from me - just Google search that idiotic company (allegedly) stil haus kitchens and check out their Facebook page. I was going to ask then publicly why they need to use spam bots.... There was no need - plenty of others have beaten me to it! Their page certainly made me smile.

Again, I realise that the link to C2 is tenuous so may I ask forgiveness in advance...?

How dare you post about something which isn't entirely about C2 in open topic which is specifically a section for talking about whatever, including stuff that isn't about C2! Rage, anger, etc

Kidding, kidding. In all seriousness, it is nice to know that their Facebook page is getting lots of complaints about it.

Unfortunately, it also implies that what they are doing is generating traffic for them, which is probably exactly what they want.

Yeah, I have to assume that the reason people keep using forum spam is it generates at least some traffic or improves their google rank through seo, also it's cheap since most of them are bots.

It's probably harder to quantify the number of users it annoys and makes decide never to do business with them because I'm not sure if I've seen any spam we've ever gotten that I would have had any interest in, and I suspect that's the case for most users here. I also wonder what the affect of people posting to their Facebook wall has.

"Hay peeps I know this forum has nothing to do with this stuff but who wants some bananas from the republic to put in yo new kitchen while wearing your ugh boots that are covered in virtual gold that makes ppl say WOW"

I mean, I dunno about anyone else, but that didn't endear me to any companies even before I became a moderator.

I'm afraid zenox has hit the nail on the head with a golly solid hammer. Google's algorithms promote sites with lots of links, which essentially means Google is a spam promoter. If there are 20 similar competing businesses in the region, then this means the spammers win on Google's search rank every time.

And the number of actual potential customers it would annoy. Basically zero. There would have to be about a billion internet users. You divide this with (or is it by) the number of annoyed forum users, and calculate their potential market range, and you'll see it's precious little potential customer backlash for a giant Google rank gain.

Unfortunately.

Blast it. No swift justice here....

We've investigated this type of thing before, and it's usually some random innocent business paying for "marketing" or "online promotion" which turns out to just be a carpet-bomb-the-internet-with-spam service. Usually the business has no idea and wanted to pay for legit marketing.

It can be effective to complain to the business being promoted - tell them their marketing company are spammers and they're clogging up forums everywhere. Sometimes they genuinely didn't know and don't want it and will cancel their deal with the marketing company. Or who knows, maybe this is what they're after and they don't care. Either way just keep reporting the posts and we'll delete them.