SEO blog tricks for tricked out SEO blog posts
I could not help but notice yet another SEO article scrambling tool being promoted on a blog. The program being offered employs some simple substitutions and word jumblings. This kind of stuff has been available for years. In fact, one of the first SEO article scrambling tools I ever used was called Babelfish.
Yes, I’m talking about Yahoo!’s translation tool (which was developed by Altavista long before Yahoo! acquired the Altavista brand and assets). Let me demonstrate how Babelfish is an article scrambling tool for you. I’ll use the first sample paragraph from the blog I just linked to. (NOTE: The source paragraph is already badly written.)
Sample Source Paragraph
First of all, you need to know what an affiliate program is and how it works in order to fully understand how you can make some money out of it. Affiliate programs is like a joint venture where you or your website becomes a partner with another website that have already developed a product or service that they are already selling in the Internet. As a partner, your job is to direct the visitors of your website to your partner website and hope that they will purchase the products or services being offered. Your website will be like the company’s marketing arm, among several.
Step 1: Translate the paragraph from English to another language. I chose Dutch.
Eerst en vooral, moet u weten wat een filiaalprogramma is en hoe het werkt om volledig te begrijpen hoe u wat geld uit het kunt maken. De programma’s van het filiaal is als een gemeenschappelijke onderneming waar u of uw website een partner met een andere website wordt die reeds een product of de dienst hebben ontwikkeld dat zij reeds in Internet verkopen. Als partner, moet uw baan de bezoekers van uw website leiden aan uw partnerwebsite en hopen dat zij de producten kopen zullen of diensten die worden de aangeboden. Uw website zal als company’ zijn; s marketing wapen, onder verscheidene.
Step 2: Translate the translated paragraph back from Dutch to English.
Firstly and especially, you must know what is a branch programme and how it works entirely to understand how you what can make money from. Programma’ s of the branch is if have developed a common venture where you or your Internet site a partner with another Internet site becomes that already a product or the service that they sell already in Internet. As a partner, must your job lead the visitors of your Internet site to your partner Internet site and hopes that they buy the products or services which are offered. Your Internet site as company’ to be; s marketing weapon, under different.
Beautiful, is it not? And that didn’t cost you would-be spammers a dime. Of course, you don’t have to use the English-to-Dutch-to-English path. You can translate it to Italian or Chinese and then come back to English. Or you can translate it to a third language before coming back to English. You’re pretty much guaranteed a randomly jumbled paragraph at the end of the pipeline that sort of looks like the original paragraph.
People from Germany used to send me angry emails informing me that my “Deutsch” pages were written in complete gibberish. For about a year I used a translate function to help people navigate my site in several languages. When I realized I looked like a fool, I took down the translation links. But spammers don’t care how foolish and stupid they look as long as the search engines don’t figure out how they jumble their text.
We can have a little fun with this and compare Google’s translation tool to Yahoo!’s. I’ll use the English-to-Dutch-to-English method again.
Allereerst moet je weten wat een affiliate programma is en hoe het werkt om volledig te begrijpen hoe je kunt maken wat geld van te maken. Affiliate programma’s is als een joint venture waar u of uw website wordt een partner met een andere website die al zijn ontwikkeld, een product of dienst dat zij al in de verkoop van het internet. Als partner, uw taak is om de bezoekers van uw website naar uw partner website en hopen dat ze de aankoop van producten of diensten dat wordt aangeboden. Uw website zal worden als het bedrijf de marketing-arm, tussen meerdere.
First of all, you know what an affiliate program is and how it works to fully understand how you can make some money out of it. Affiliate programs as a joint venture where you or your website is a partner with another website that have already developed a product or service that they are already in the sale of the Internet. As a partner, your task is to protect the visitors to your site to your partner website and hope that they purchase products or services being offered. Your website will be as the company’s marketing arm, among several.
Well, I’m glad to know that as an affiliate my task is to protect the visitors to my site.
Translation tricks become trickier when you are dealing with longer sentences, longer paragraphs, and complete pages. I suspect, however, that translating pages which use DIVs or table code to move text around (so that it does not linearize well) is even more complex. After all, the translation tool is only as good as the information provided to it.
Spam blogs scramble their content to avoid search engine filters. It’s an easy way to cloak content scraping from simple-algorithmed duplicate content tools (like Copyscape). We’re fast approaching a time where we’ll need language-independent tools to help us find out who is using our copy.
And that opens up a whole ‘nother realm of search engine optimization challenge. Google already claims to search multiple languages for relevant content if they cannot satisfy queries in a native mode. For example, if you search in Portuguese for blogs about SEO theory, the odds are pretty slim that you’ll find much about SEO theory in Portuguese.
Google translates “seo theory” into Portuguese as “Seo teoria”. Yahoo! translated “seo theory” into Portuguese as “teoria do seo”. I don’t actually read Portuguese but I think that Google’s Portuguese Web results for “teoria do seo” don’t look very relevant. A query using the alternative translation offers similar results. Nor does it help to switch to “seo teoria”.
I’m completely invisible to the Portuguese Web. To make matters worse, I cannot even add a decent plug-in to this blog to make my posts available in Portuguese. Oh, sure, there’s a plug-in that scrapes Google’s translation tool but the writers forced it to send a Code 404 with every page. Why? Because they felt their servers would be crushed by an overwhelming onslaught of page requests (I think from the translation tool).
That’s a shame. I wonder why the translated articles cannot be cached or stored internally and served as normal pages. Still, we can completely translate our Wordpress blogs into other languages and not one search engine will realize those translations exist. Do you know where I am going with this?
Yes, a spammer could easily scrape my blog, translate every page, and then repost those translated pages on another site. Who would know where the authoritative source was? Certainly not Google. Nor Yahoo!, which was unable to locate the SEO Theory blog in a Web-wide search for “seo teoria” and “teoria de seo”.
So, having searched the Portuguese Web I have to wonder why Google did not suggest any relevant English-language sources of “SEO Theory” (technically, I know of only one blog in the world that specializes in SEO Theory”). If I search the Web from Google’s Portuguese portal for “seo teoria” I still don’t find SEO Theory. That’s not so good.
What’s a good blogger to do when he is at the mercy of the search engines’ blindness and the spammers’ desire to make money?
Believe it or not, I think there are options, but none of them are pleasant.
First, we could translate our own blogs into every language available by hand. Ick. There are between 400 and 500 posts on SEO Theory, and there will be many more in the future (I hope). Multiple that by 20, 30, 40, or 50 languages and you’ll see it’s a full-time job for someone to run the automated translation tools, scrape the results, and embed them in new blog posts (good thing I don’t use many embedded images and videos on this blog).
It’s a task that would make the most automated of spammers puke. Then again, maybe the spammers are on to something. Maybe the only feasible solution for us is to translate our sites en masse via some sort of automaton that scrambles up the words just enough that a casual reader can get a good laugh over our casual ignorance of their languages.
Tolkien fans in Spain are probably still laughing over the way I called myself a Tolkien ventilladore a few years back, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who has been undone on the Web by a translation tool.
Spammers don’t really care if their jumbled up crap makes sense as long as someone clicks on their ads. Search engines need to care, however, because they are trying to help people find something relevant and useful. So maybe we should start embedding translations of our articles’ main points in the English text.
For example, Portuguese readers take note: rel = nofollow de ligaes internas ruim.
If you’re an English reader and want to know what I just told our Portuguese-speaking compadres (that is Spanish), I said, “rel = nofollow internal connections is bad”.
Or did I?
Frankly, I have no idea of what I just wrote in Portuguese. Does that make me a spammer?
Or, to put it more precisely, do we all look like spammers if we translate our copy using automated tools? Maybe that Code 404 the Wordpress plug-in delivers to the search engines is a good thing. We could be banned accidentally because someone pointed a link at our sites through a translation tool.
Do search engines dream of banning, penalizing, or filtering the results that are produced by their own translation tools?
Having an enquiring mind, I had to find out what I just wrote in the preceding sentence in Greek through Yahoo!:
?? ??????? ?????????? ???????????? ??? ??????????, ??? ???????, ? ?? ??????????? ??? ????????????? ??? ?????????? ??? ?? ???????? ??????????? ????;
I have no idea of what that means. It looks like badly translated Greek to me (and it looks like lots of question marks to you).
Google brings the Yahoo! translation back as:
The search engines dreaming of the ban, punishment or filtering of results produced by the translation tools?
Do you see where this is going? It won’t cost me a dime to create spam content that is virtually distinguishable from its original form. I may not have a future in either Greek or Portuguese search engine optimization but by Golly! I’ll be able to spam them all with impunity.
Spam the torpedos! Full translation ahead!
www.seo-theory.com
published @ September 12, 2008