So as I’m frequently in the habit of doing I was perusing my comments to see what people were saying on my site and stumbled across a new comment from a guy (we’ll call him Ignorant Douchebag Spammer or Steve for short) who at first glance appeared to be posting a relevant comment:
Affordable Web Design In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.
These words seemed to fit into the post I’d made (where I talk about switching over to Disqus) perfectly. It immediately dawned on me the reason it fit so perfectly is that it was a direct quote of my post. Once I realized this I checked on Disqus to see what else this asshat had posted. Comment after comment he’d quoted a short snippet from the blogs he’d commented on. Sort of creative but a really terrible and dangerous methodology to get SEO benefits. Here’s the link to his comment threads on Disqus. Once I’d removed and marked as spam the comment I decided to see what type of guy was behind this. So I popped over to his website and took a look. Let me digress for a moment by giving a few short rules to being a web developer and/or designer:
- Know what Information Delivery means (Your site shouldn’t look pretty first and give information second unless your site is a photo or illustration portfolio and even that should balance well with the delivery of information).
- Know what color consistency is (you don’t need to use all 65 million possible colors on your page, really trust me on this).
- Know how to make your pages consistent (if I click 3 pages on your site at random and none of the color schemes, layouts match…you’re not doing it right).
- Understand (I mean REALLY understand) how to properly choose and use fonts. A simple rule of thumb is: never use more than 3 fonts on a single website. Using more than that just looks chaotic and is stressful to the eye.
- Never ever ever ever (really EVER) proclaim yourself as “premiere” or an “expert” on anything when you obviously aren’t. Especially not an SEO expert.
Ok now that we’ve covered those basics let’s get back to the asshat that prompted this post. Now some of you might think that I crafted the above list with Steve (the spamming douchebag) in mind. Not true, that list was given to me by a long time friend 10 years ago when I first got into doing web development. Oddly Steve (the spamming douchebag) managed to break (with great alacrity no less) all 5 rules with just the front page of his site.
- Rule #1: His site is a (to quote Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead) psychedelic mess.
- Rule #2: There are at least 4 colors to many (impressive since 3 of those colors are differing shades of blue).
- Rule #3: How in the heck did he do this? The header, sidebars, content and footer all have widely varying styles (I know it’s sort of amazing really).
- Rule #4: There are 7 different fonts used on the front page alone. I suppose one could play Devil’s Advocate and say he was trying to show that he could design a page to use different fonts but that Devil’s Advocate wouldn’t really be trying)
- Rule #5: Steve (the spamming douchebag) calls himself an “SEO Expert” yet his craptastic website has a Google pagerank of 3. That’s like saying George Bush is an expert at being President.
This is perfectly in sync with what I’ve been saying on twitter the last few days. It seems every 4th person that follows me has a job title of “Social Media Consultant” or “SEO Expert”. I remember these days perfectly 8 years ago during the Dot Com bubble. Every asshat with Front Page was suddenly an expert Web Designer yet none of them knew a damned thing. So far I haven’t linked the site that Steve (the spamming douchebag) “designed” because I don’t want to give him the benefits of my Google Ranking, which is hilariously a 4 even though I haven’t done any SEO work on my site EVER (other than running Wordpress and making sure to have a standard compliant site). Speaking of standards compliance Steve’s site gets the fail whale there too.
So here Steve (you spamming douchebag) I’ll link to your site, but first here’s a quick rundown of other folks on the web who blogged about you before me: RipOffReport.com outsourcing fraud listing
If you’re going to say you do something you damn sure need to know how to do it, Steve Shearer doesn’t.
A quick update by the way: It looks like the way Disqus let’s you see all of the comments by a user in a single page means finding spammers out becomes vastly easier (such is the case with Steve (the spamming douchebag)
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