Self Promotion and General Back Slapping

[Nick W]

....im seeing a lot of it.

Is this going to continue or what?


Nick

[rcjordan]

(Hey Nick!)

Par for the course in forums --where's NFFC? Maybe we'll have him send a polite note or two.

[Jeremy_Goodrich]

What I think is fabulous are these types of threads -

hi guys, i'm trying to figure out who http://www.my-clients-site.com/ is getting nowhere in Google.

I'm using the 'SEO Trick' volume 193, and it seems that I may have a penalty? Can you review my site, and tell me what SEO techniques you'd use to boost it up?

Love those. Seen a couple this morning, and I get the feeling that there'll be more to come - what was it that NFFC said? "We're more or less all SEO's here, so we know how to break the rules..."?

Something along those lines, I can appreciate the sentiment. While 'towing the line' maybe what we do professionally, personally, I wouldn't drop my url in a forum & say, "Gee, I'm optimizing for blue polka dotted leopards and my site is blue-polka-dotted-spam.com - the SEO book I read said I need links. How can I submit to 5K guestbooks?" ;)

[Terry Plank]

Nick, I'm not experiencing that much self promotion in posts. Most posts I've been viewing have been pretty good at helping without self promoting. Ones that have been questionable seem to have been dealt with by Moderators.

[Primedit]

As a new poster to these forums I recently had a post removed accused of self promotion. I can honestly say this was not the intention of my post - I spent a long time creating something (which was actually relevent to the post) and wanted to show it to people so I could get feedback. So I posted and got rebuked. So I queried it with the mods and got an embarrassing "Flaming" response. It is difficult to know what people class as self promotion. When you have slaved over something and are proud of the results, it is nice to tell people what you have been working on when there is a relevent post. It is not wrong to be proud of your achievements and want to show it off, nor is it wrong to ask people for feedback.

Sure, the moderators have a tough job, but embarrasing people in a public forum sure is not part of the job description - especially if their intentions were genuine. This is my final post!!!!

[seobook]

As a new poster to these forums I recently had a post removed accused of self promotion. I can honestly say this was not the intention of my post - I spent a long time creating something (which was actually relevent to the post) and wanted to show it to people so I could get feedback. So I posted and got rebuked. So I queried it with the mods and got an embarrassing "Flaming" response. It is difficult to know what people class as self promotion. When you have slaved over something and are proud of the results, it is nice to tell people what you have been working on when there is a relevent post. It is not wrong to be proud of your achievements and want to show it off, nor is it wrong to ask people for feedback.

Sure, the moderators have a tough job, but embarrasing people in a public forum sure is not part of the job description - especially if their intentions were genuine. This is my final post!!!!

it is hard to balance things and sometimes people make bad judgement calls. if you let a single post or post removal dictate your future involvement with the community then you were likely to stumble into trouble eventually anyway.

often times people take things personally for all the wrong reasons. i have had a post removed, but I keep typing. as long as less than 98% of the people hate me then I will keep typing. (thanks to DanThies and Dodger for helping to keep me above a 2% approval rating :))

[Brad]

Moderating a bunch of Internet marketers is a thankless job. (Think: patroling a DMZ somewhere.) Every single one of us is going to try to test the boundries, just because we are hardwired to do that. :D

It's even harder to moderate a new forum where everyone and everything is new and members don't have a long history of posts - makes it hard to judge intent and who to watch and who to let slide. ;)

[Anthony Parsons]

I don't think personal opinions can come into it, in all honesty. If a link is relevant to the post material, then leave it alone I say, unless it points to something undesirable. The search engines pay very little respect to any link coming from a forum nowadays, so I am at a lose to know why moderators would really worry about it.

hi guys, i'm trying to figure out who http://www.my-clients-site.com/ is getting nowhere in Google.

Sure some people may be spamming the forum in these instances, but some are just dumb founded with no idea and more or less either stumbled upon the forum to ask the question or got directed to the forum to ask the question. I think automatic removal on an instant assumption is enough to give a forum a bad reputation amongst those who are truely looking for help. What the hell is the point of a community otherwise. These things weren't made just for professionals. You see it in every forum. High Rankings is probably the worst as many don't read the rules, post a link, and relevant or not, the link is removed. That pretty much well turns most away to find the answer elsewhere IMO.

If a moderator is unhappy with a link in a post, as above for example, then deactivate the link and see what happens with the post. A person might be in trouble, and if so, I guess you will find out if they repost the link.

[Primedit]

I don't think personal opinions can come into it, in all honesty. If a link is relevant to the post material, then leave it alone I say, unless it points to something undesirable. The search engines pay very little respect to any link coming from a forum nowadays, so I am at a lose to know why moderators would really worry about it.



Sure some people may be spamming the forum in these instances, but some are just dumb founded with no idea and more or less either stumbled upon the forum to ask the question or got directed to the forum to ask the question. I think automatic removal on an instant assumption is enough to give a forum a bad reputation amongst those who are truely looking for help. What the hell is the point of a community otherwise. These things weren't made just for professionals. You see it in every forum. High Rankings is probably the worst as many don't read the rules, post a link, and relevant or not, the link is removed. That pretty much well turns most away to find the answer elsewhere IMO.

If a moderator is unhappy with a link in a post, as above for example, then deactivate the link and see what happens with the post. A person might be in trouble, and if so, I guess you will find out if they repost the link.


I think soon becomes quite clear if someone is spamming the forums when they consistently enter every thread available and leave their url to mysite.com asking people for feedback. Individual posts which ask people for feedback or comments when related to the thread topic are usually genuine and the person posting has good intentions. Removing a post without telling the person who posted it is quite simply censorship by the moderators and censorship is a very dangerous thing. Certainly, there will always be the need for taking down posts which are clearly spamming the forums, but it needs to be done carefully and with sensitivity. I am only still using these forums because I have been encouraged by what other members have said.
Ordinarily, I would simply go to another forum where I felt more comfortable about the post moderation. I do sympathise with the job the mod's have to do, but they need to be impartial and follow clear procedures before they remove any post. Personal opinions should never enter into it - nor should sponsorship issues. Moderators should certainly never ever publicly ridicule a member over a private message querying the post removal (as recently happenned to me). All this should be done in private, away from the public forum. In the main, if you treat people with respect, they will respect the rules. This forum will quickly get a bad reputation and the moderators will be unfairly accused of being aloof if post removals continue without some kind of checks and balances being put in place.

[andrewgoodman]

Primedit, the "poor me" act is getting old. From the second you stepped into this forum, and escalating with your own dumbfounded, outraged messages, edits, deletes, and padded-room vents, it has been about you. You haven't thought for a second about anyone else's needs but your own.

Consider that I hadn't gone anywhere near editing or deleting a single post until you arrived, and was hoping that situation would continue forevermore.

Trust me, we've all been there. We've all crossed the line and tried to push our own agendas on a forum somewhere, and been rebuked for it. I don't believe they even allow me to post my own name at some forums because that would be self-promotion. (Yikes! Anonymity is better than publicity! I would of course rather have you post your self-promotion with your own name so you can at least be held accountable for your actions.)

In your case, your post was a real downer for what was a perfectly fine thread about vertical search. The moment you stepped into that thread, the thread was now about you. You are acting confused and hurt, but I do believe it's an act. You tried to take advantage, and got caught. We've all been there.

Now, in the padded room, it's about you again, predicting that the SEWatch Forums will self-destruct unless you get your way. See the pattern?

You've indicated that you're a person of some repute and that your impressive product is about to be "adopted" by a "major search engine." When this happens, don't hesitate to send out a press release. I might even receive it and consider it along with all the other press releases I receive.

In your post above, you (again) imply that your post's deletion was influenced by Google's sponsorship of this site. Of course that suggestion doesn't even warrant a comment! Moderators are volunteers and are looking to keep the forum as useful as possible for members. I have better things to do with my time than to "censor" people, or for that matter, to discuss the subtleties of forum rules. In future I expect that we'll just apply the rules and that will be that.

A piece of advice: people will have more confidence in your sincerity if you join a forum and genuinely participate for awhile before starting to use it as a platform for bizdev. When you just fly in out of nowhere and try to make the claim that your "look at me now" post is "relevant to the thread topic," you're going to create resentment *unless* you've already developed some credibility.

[Primedit]

What have you got against me andrewgoodman? Why do you insist in flaming my posts? If you do not like what I have posted then send me a PM - just stop flaming my posts.

I will not bother coming to this forum again. It is simply not worth my time

[Anthony Parsons]

Wack Wack....Casevac Required.....

Ouch.

[pleeker]

The search engines pay very little respect to any link coming from a forum nowadays, so I am at a lose to know why moderators would really worry about it.

Because allowing random link-dropping will turn the Forum into a classified ads site, and I don't think any of us are here for that, are we?

I'm here to learn, discuss, and on rare occasion, maybe help someone else. I think that's what most of us are here for. And it can be done quite easily without link-dropping. :)

[David Wallace]

I don't think this thread is really going anywhere productive so I am closing it.