3 Easy Steps To Ruin A Great Blog It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to build a strong group blog. You need to establish a brand, build a team of knowledgeable bloggers, create quality content, and basically work your ass off for very little reward. In the end, if you do thinks right, you end up with a strong blog with a solid reputation. On the other hand, ruining that reputation and destroying the blog is very easy. Step 1: Don't communicate Step 2: Stop moderating Step 3: Put spammers in charge Now all you need to do is sit back and watch your blog self-destruct. The old-guard blogging team will be disenfranchised and pissed off, the new spammer-bloggers will abuse the site with shitty content and spammy links back to their own sites, and the comments will be flooded with viagra-spam. Mission accomplished. CommentAddicted or not?0 comments  Social media is everywhere and has found it's way deep in human society. So deep that a new addiction is born.. Facebook!
... read more
The three SEO timelines and rank...1 comment  In a new slideshare presentation HubSpot presents some stats from the 'Inbound marketing' report it published earlier this year but the slideshare also contains intere...... read more
An interim-publisher saying hell...20 comments  Yesterday my friend Henk asked me if I wanted to blog on this group blog, an invitation I accepted (if not I wouldn’t be posting this, obviously). When talking a...... read more
Guest blogging for dummies19 comments I’m a relatively new face on this blog, and blogged here for a while, and I thank the owners of it to have given me the opportunity to be here. I’ve been following, to my stupefaction, what has been going on here the
last few days, so I wanted to talk about guest blogging. When people
invite me to guest blog, I thank them. Not because I can use the
exposure or links, but because they think I can add value to what they
do.
It’s standard practice that the people who i...... read more
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Comments (26)
Wow! Great article. I only count 3 steps, but it's still great :)
Just wondering: are you pointing to some specific blog ;)
Mon 10 May 2010, 16:55
Yeah corrected it to 3 - I lost the ability to count there for a second. I need more coffee.
And of course I'm not talking about a specific blog, that would be rude. These are just general comments, tips for blog owners to keep in mind, you know.
If anyone was really so stupid to actually go ahead and implement these 3 easy steps, well, that would be rather silly, wouldn't it?
Mon 10 May 2010, 16:57
lol. yeah, that would be a silly, terrible waste.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:00
Wow, tnx! I've really missed the great and insightful articles over here! :)
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:08
1 easy step to ruin your brand identity: Stick a banner advert over your site's logo header. Good work.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:09
1 easy step to ruin your brand identity: Stick a banner advert over your site's logo header. Good work.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:09
Where the articles that bad? I just read two and while they didn't set the world alight they were informative at least. Or am I missing something?
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:10
@Guk I don't know which articles you read, but look at these articles:
searchcowboys.com/bloggers/781
Like I said, it's not about the content in the first place, but do you think it's a coincidence that the backlinks are in the first lines of those stories?
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:18
haha great article. Unfortunately it's probably too late.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:23
you could just moderate content before it goes on!!!
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:24
@Dave - regular bloggers like myself don't get full access. We can write and publish articles here on SC, but nothing more. We can't moderate comments, we can't change other bloggers' articles (to remove spammy links), so we're pretty powerless.
And with the management not responding or stepping up to the challenge, all us bloggers can do is sit back and watch our hard work go down the drain....
All we can do is write a snarky sarcastic blog post about it. ;)
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:27
and another one:
searchcowboys.com/socialmedia/1551
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:30
@Barry Adams
As you say with your hands tied it just means that this is a really good blog that is,
1. Getting destroyed by a couple of bad posts.
2. Not being maintained by moderates to prevent the blog turning into a train wreck.(as in what has happened today)
Think people need to stop comments and try and repair damage done.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:35
It only needs one step...
1.let you post something.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:37
Is the only problem here that the company used SEO Company as the anchor text? Have read one of the posts which was ok, (not filer but not brilliant), so surely they are allowed a link back to their website?
Not sure what al the fuss is over here.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:43
SEO company / SEO / Click Consult :- Talk about milking it for your own brand.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:50
No, nobody says something about dropping a link in great content.
But putting 5 backlinks from the homepage with anchors like "SEO", "Internet Marketing" etc. is somethink different.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:50
@Fabs: we had a "gentleman's agreement" on this blog - write great content and don't abuse it for self-promotion. Once in a while you could put a link in to your own site, if you felt it added value to the article. But SC was never a vehicle for shameless self-promotion. SC stood for quality search & social news.
That changed very quickly when spammers were put in charge. Self-promotion became the norm, totally irrelevant links with juicy anchor texts were inserted in every post, and the quality of the content became mediocre at best (and I'm being generous here).
On top of that none of the owners behind the site ever took the time to communicate with the established bloggers. We heard nothing, knew nothing, all we saw was bad content with spammy links appear on the site and comments filling up with spam.
It would have been very easy to stop the decline - moderate comments & articles and put someone in charge who knows what to do. The owners did no such thing, and what you see here on the site today is the inevitable (and, yes, sad) result.
Mon 10 May 2010, 17:53
@Barry,
well said!
Mon 10 May 2010, 21:12
I would like to add another one: thinking the value of a blog is in anything else than the quality of your bloggers. The bloggers make your blog, not your name or your reputation but the continuous flow of high quality posts. It's a shame to see a blog with such a great group of bloggers (probably one of the best in Europe) crumble down like this.
Tue 11 May 2010, 09:33
Didn't you forget step 4?
* When editor in chief leaves all follow his footsteps.
Tue 11 May 2010, 09:51
@Jim: no, we did not follow our editor in chief. We stuck around waiting to see what would happen to SC. When it became clear that what was happening was Bad Stuff, then we looked for greener pastures. Cause and effect - the cause is horrendously bad management, the effect is departing bloggers.
Tue 11 May 2010, 10:05
you want to know my point of view on the whole thing in detail
Tue 11 May 2010, 11:34
@Jim I think every blogger writes because he wants to get some attention from an audience. I don't have an own blog, because I don't have enough time to write good content on a regular basis. So I like to post on bigger blogs, because they already have an audience and it doesn't matter if I blog only once a month or something.
When Bas left I asked him if I could write for State of Search too. I never thought about leaving Searchcowboys but I thought I could write different articles on both blogs to attract more attention.
For me it's better to have writing opportunities on both blogs. I even have one blogpost for Searchcowboys ready on my computer!
But a few things on Searchcowboys weren't okay from the beginning:
- the lack of comment spamfilters.
- the publicity in Dutch on an english blog.
We told the owner's of Searchcowboys of these problems more than one year ago, but nothing happened. Okay, no problem.
But then Bas left and we were all asking what will happen with Searchcowboys, what will happen with our content? And we never got an answer to that! We never got not even one e-mail of the SC owners.
Than we saw new bloggers getting introduced. That's okay. We didn't know if these were the new chief editors, but okay we got new colleagues....great.
But now we see what some of these new bloggers are up to (spam). We started discussing this, hoping the owners of Searchcowboys would react. But nobody did.
@Jim I think every blogger writes because he wants to get some attention from an audience. I don't have an own blog, because I don't have enough time to write good content on a regular basis. So I like to post on bigger blogs, because they already have an audience and it doesn't matter if I blog only once a month or something.
When Bas left I asked him if I could write for State of Search too. I never thought about leaving Searchcowboys but I thought I could write different articles on both blogs to attract more attention.
For me it's better to have writing opportunities on both blogs. I even have one blogpost for Searchcowboys ready on my computer!
But a few things on Searchcowboys weren't okay from the beginning:
- the lack of comment spamfilters.
- the publicity in Dutch on an english blog.
We told the owner's of Searchcowboys of these problems more than one year ago, but nothing happened. Okay, no problem.
But then Bas left and we were all asking what will happen with Searchcowboys, what will happen with our content? And we never got an answer to that! We never got not even one e-mail of the SC owners.
Than we saw new bloggers getting introduced. That's okay. We didn't know if these were the new chief editors, but okay we got new colleagues....great.
I love working with Bas, because of his dedication to our industry, but for me personally it would be better to have the opportunity to write on both blogs. But when colleagues abuse the reputation that we build together in the past 1,5 years I just don't want to write anymore.
I was hoping to get a reaction of the SC owners, but all I saw is that they are blaming Bas for this. Bas didn't even know about my post until I posted it!
Tue 11 May 2010, 11:49
Oops something went wrong copying/pasting my comment. Sorry for that! I still have an account, but unfortunately we cannot edit comments :(
Tue 11 May 2010, 11:54
Great post. I can't believe that someone would give the viagra spammers a login though - that's just suicide!
Tue 11 May 2010, 13:54