No, I Won't Link to Your Spammy Article

> Many years ago sending links to site owners and asking for a "linkback" was part and parcel of how you grew your website on the internet.

Man, that was really a long time ago.

Yeah, if I wasn't already overwhelmed by stuff to be depressed about, this would be just the thing to push me over the edge. But as it is, this ship sailed a couple decades ago.

Back then, those emails weren't clearly spammed to a pre-purchased list of "key industry influencer".

> how is it that the community aspect of the web has atrophied away to dust?

You've answered it yourself. The web got commercialized. What was once a larger community became pockets of small communities desperately trying to hide from the cancer that is marketing, which has eaten most of the Web.

I also understand what he is saying but the article has a petty tone. I really don't find it very endearing.

It's not so much dead as it's been automated.

When you write a blog article (wordpres, medium and co), any link you point to will automatically get a notification that it's been linked to by your new article.

You can sometimes see list of comments each with a backlink at the end of a blog article, it's generated from that.

> But it is necessary because of the way the economy works and in a lot of ways the business which shouts its vaguely targeted message into the void the loudest tends to win.

That isn't really necessary, it's just a zero-sum game the economy is stuck in. A world of good could be done by enlightened regulators, if they would start curtailing the worst aspects of marketing and advertising space.

In today's world, you need a megaphone to have even a tiny chance of being heard in a space where everyone else is already shouting through megaphones of their own. If someone could step in and take everyone's megaphones away, maybe then we'd have a chance at having a conversation.

They’re asking the blog owner to create SEO spam.

I get at least 3 or 4 of these emails a week, and my site is a user-generated one along the same lines as HN or Reddit. They link to some thread vaguely related to a topic (e.g. VPNs, pets, gardening), usually compliment me on that "article", and ask me to publish their article on the subject too.

These aren't genuine requests. They're sending them to sites like mine where the request doesn't even make sense--the site isn't a blog, all they'd have to do is register and they could post any article themselves (I'd ban them immediately, but they could do it).

They're absolutely spam, and once you see a few of them you realize how formulaic they all are. There must be some tool that generates them, they usually just have some minor differences in words/phrasing (basically "spinning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning).

For many of us, the fact that it is "unsolicited" means it is spam. I really don't care if it was an e-mail sent out to 1000 random people or it was "targeted" to 20 people just like me.

If it's commercial and unsolicited, it's spam and I will treat it as such.

It is spam. I get them as well. It's annoying.

Yup, and they have to do it like that because spamming links in comments no longer works because most commenting systems add a meta tag to the links so that search engines won't follow / consider them for ranking.

He's not really writing it for the bots emailing him, he's saying "this SEO growth tactic sucks, marketers should stop it!" in a creative way.

One of us solicited it!

He is unethical?

> What we all do with spam is ignore it.

There are two kinds of people: those who ignore it and those who fight it. The former can afford it because of the efforts of the latter.

No, he doesn’t, he comes across as someone who is helping by trying to react to a serious problem in a way that, if we all did it, might go some way to solving it. I wish everyone would/could do something like this.

If you send me an unsolicited email you/your company goes on an avoid list and it would take a very strong, very personal recommendation for me to work with you after that.

Unsolicited email is targeted (or in some cases, pretty untargeted) advertising. It’s unprofessional, unpleasant and a hassle, and should be called out and heavily penalised whenever possible.