How to prevent adding tags?

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Well, for starters, maybe Smashwords should have a search system that's independent of the tags in the epub file.

I sent them a message pointing out that their TOS states that keyword spamming is prohibited in both content and tags, yet people are still doing it. I suggested that they limit the number of tags authors can use. I doubt if it will matter but I felt like I had to do something.

I won't even go into the SEO idiots; I get to deal with them in person, too. *sigh* They're firmly convinced that not only are they smarter than Google's building full of geniuses, but that they can outsmart said geniuses, and the algorithms produced by the same, with some technique that was lame when someone thought it up two years ago.

Oh, I get at least 4 emails and 3 calls each week.

SEO: We noticed you're not showing up in Google. We can fix that for you!
Me: Then you obviously didn't look. We're consistently in the top three results for our most searched terms, and have been for nearly two years.
SEO: Uh... oh... Who are you using for your search engine marketing?
Me: Me.
SEO: What techniques are you using?
Me: Good design and relevant content. Goodbye.

SEO companies are the bane of my existence. Them and Angie's List. Don't even get me started on Angie's List. Ugh.

Well, I got off-topic there. I think people need to start griping to sites who encourage the keyword nonsense like Smashwords. Beyond that, I have no idea except to let the authors know. Maybe start a thread in General Discussions asking for author input? People listen to you and you say things better than I do.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

The funniest, though (one I found, not built a site for!) was someone who had this insane idea that if he hid every possible porn-related term in his pages, he'd get hits from people looking for porn. Which, even if he did ... what good would that do him? Nobody is going to be looking for porn, find his site, and zip up their pants and buy car parts! Yeah, he was selling car parts. I was there looking for a brake light bulb. I couldn't understand why his pages loaded so slowly on my broadband connection, so I looked at the source ... and there were his thousands of keywords. Some of them beyond twisted. Nobody searching for that stuff is gonna be buying car parts instead!

(remaining off-topic)

I have seen this many times, both professionally and as a web surfer. Almost invariably these sites have been hacked, with all that stuff added by the bad guys. I had one case where at least 5 different 'organizations' had injected stuff into a website. The hacking/injection is done by scanning 'bots. My personal site gets scanned by malicious 'bots between 20 and 100 times per day. looking for known holes in common web SW packages. People seem not to understand that security updates must be applied to applications as well as the OS. Sigh...

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by chaley

(remaining off-topic)

I have seen this many times, both professionally and as a web surfer. Almost invariably these sites have been hacked, with all that stuff added by the bad guys. I had one case where at least 5 different 'organizations' had injected stuff into a website. The hacking/injection is done by scanning 'bots. My personal site gets scanned by malicious 'bots between 20 and 100 times per day. looking for known holes in common web SW packages. People seem not to understand that security updates must be applied to applications as well as the OS. Sigh...

Tell me about it ... I've had to try to explain to a site's owner how and why a site needed to be de-hacked. In this particular case, it was being hijacked if you hit it via a search engine, but not if you went there directly, and of course the owner never had any need to search for it. *sigh* But not in this case. Y'see, it gets better: not long ago, in Clientcopia, I read about someone who tried to convince a prospective client that was a bad idea. A prospective client who owned an auto parts site. I can't think that's a coincidence.

Despite the prevalence of hackers (and the clutter worms leave in my logs), however, don't put anything past the stupidity of site owners. There was one I turned down a number of years ago who wanted her entire site solely in Flash because she liked how it looked. She'd rather have an non-accessible, search-proof, user-repellent site just so she could keep precise control over how every page was presented. Every page for her furniture store. Is it any surprise that she ended up out of business (never having found anyone willing to do a Flash site for her, at least not for what she wanted to pay)?