Recently, on the blog

Answer: When they're an overseas design sweatshop using dodgy SEO tactics.

I'm used to getting comment-spam on my blogs. Disqus is cleans out most of it automatically, but a few make it through to publication. Fortunately, Disqus sends out notifications on new comments, so I'm able to manually filter out anything that doesn't seem genuine.

What is comment spam?

Comment spam is used by dodgy SEO businesses trying to build backlinks for themselves or their clients. The idea is that you choose a blog that's relevant to the search terms you want to build PageRank for and insert a comment (genuine interaction seems to be unneccessary) that has a backlink to your site. 

While this can build pagerank on the site you've linked to, it only works if the site you're spamming has a higher pagerank than your own and is relevant to the kind of keywords you hope people will use to find your own site.

It also won't help you if you get branded as a spammer by doing so.

Each of Australia's major Telco's have their strengths and weaknesses, perceived or otherwise.

Nowhere are these attributes more starkly revealed than when dealing with customer support, particularly via social media channels.

When Telstra recently announced their competitive cap plans, I decided it was time to take advantage of the top mobile network in the country. Although the quality of their phone network had worsened, Optus had been good to us, a stark contrast to our previous dealings with Vodafone.

One particular area that Optus excells at is customer support via social media channels and I have personally been the beneficiary of excellent treatment by the Optus team.

I'm now one month into our new contract with Telstra. How do they stack up?

Just like everyone else, we get a lot of spam.

Most of it comes through our email address, but Gmail tends to weed out almost all of it. We get a little through our contact forms, typically overseas companies spruiking SEO services.

I always enjoy the delicious irony of being sent unsolicited mail telling me I need SEO services. Clearly the spammer managed to find me, surely that should mean regular people can too, right?

Lately I've been getting a different type of spam. SEO must be on the way out, because at least a half-dozen emails a day are pushing design services and PSD to HTML conversion.

Normally, I just mark them as junk and move on, but yesterday's influx gave me hours of amusement thanks to the spammers at CSS Chopper.

Today on Twitter I came across a well-written and persuasive argument by Alisha Runckel for why Facebook should institute a 'dislike' button .

Alisha makes a case for the 'dislike' button with two solid points: That for business, every post becomes a poll, while for regular people the ability to 'dislike' a post allows for a greater degree of empathy.

As a marketer, the idea of being able to casually poll opinions (and the supporting analytics that could be associated with it) with nearly zero barrier to entry almost makes me salivate. It's a great plan. It also has a few minor but potentially serious flaws. More on that later, however.

My primary beef is with the idea of 'dislike' buttons for personal posts. 

In my previous article on building a quality Twitter campaign I laid out some rules for acquiring engaged followers, a vital pre-requisite for ensuring your message is read and disseminated beyond your own timeline.

One of those rules was to always look for people who have more followers than they themselves are following.

I've since come to realise that this rule doesn't go far enough. I now believe you should avoid following all but those few incredible voices that you can truly converse with and who are passionately interested in the niche you're carving out.

Once you clear away the noise, you'll find a wealth of conversation awaits with strong brand and topic focus that will help you grow a following of truly engaged and interested followers.

The first part of our series on getting the most from AdWords focused on the basics of creating more clickable advertising. Part two looks at where to send your traffic what to do with it once it arrives!

Create relevant landing pages

How many times have you clicked on an ad, only to arrive at a generic page that seemingly has nothing to do with the search you performed?

You hate it. I hate it - everyone who uses Google hates clicking through to irrelevant pages.

Guess what? Google hates it too.

How many times have you performed a search for a product or service and been delivered sponsored results for something completely unrelated? (Locksmiths, I'm looking at you!)

It's exactly this kind of issue that causes businesses to lose faith in PPC advertising. When a user is served ads that don't meet their needs both the user and the business become disillusioned as to the value of search marketing. 

Fortunately for all parties involved, Google has a vested interest in serving relevant ads to users. Google provides a strong financial incentive for businesses to ensure their ads are properly crafted and relevant to the needs of searchers.

Here are some simple tactics for ensuring a better CTR (Click Through Rate) while saving money on your online marketing.

While this isn't strictly a Joomla tip, it's certainly something that has helped me more easily track the volume of traffic that comes from specific posts I make on forums and social media sites. 

One of the reasons I find this necessary is that I'm very active on multiple forums and often reference my own blog posts when helping others. While it's easy enough to see that a certain amount of traffic is coming from one of these forums, it can be a little tougher to get an idea of which specific discussions are generating interest.

So I use a very simple trick and append my URLs with an identifier. For example, in a recent post on the K2 community forums, in a discussion about tagging, I used my own blog as an example. The URL I gave them was http://thinksync.com.au/blog?utm_source=SBF&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=tagging.

I generated this URL by using the Google URL Builder.

Now in Google Analytics, I can look in my campaign view and see 'tagging' appended to any traffic that arrives at my site from that post.

This is great intelligence, helping me to determine which topics are popular and worth spending time on for future posts. 

Validating a website has become standard practice among designers over the last few years. As a site nears completion, the designer tests the site against the W3C Validator service to ensure that the code meets the standards, allowing them to proudly display a badge declaring their competency.

I have no real problem with this, except insofar as it provides no value (except to the designer's ego!) to show this badge.

The real problem lies with the claim that validation is inherently valuable as an SEO tactic. Sites like Google, Amazon and a plethora of other high-ranking sites stand as proof positive that validation alone will not ensure your site ranks highly.

So why is validation touted as an SEO technique?

This week nearly 20,000 Facebook users were duped into 'liking' a rogue fanpage called 'The argument that disproves atheism'.

Like many other users, I clicked on the link that appeared in my newsfeed, mainly due to curiosity at what had come over my friend to post such a link.

A sizeable group of us were caught out, suddenly and inexplicably 'liking' a fanpage without the usual button-clicking. Just clicking a normal looking link seemed to be enough, which has scary implications for Facebook's 'social graph', if it can be gamed so easily.

Fortunately, while people might have difficulty removing the notification of the 'like', it's simple enough to remove the application from your profile altogether.