In the last 4 weeks I have banned 5 people from this site. They all pissed me off in the exact same way.

Google loves us. GoogleBot indexes our site several times a day. Anything posted on this site is, for the most part, is immediately available on Google via a search. It’s a nice treat to know that Google loves us.

A perfect example of our search engine friendliness happened right after September 11th. The day of the 9-11 attacks, we posted some of our thoughts and feelings about the attack. That week, whenever someone typed in something about the World Trade Center, we ranked very highly, above most news sites such as CNN. It wasn’t until two weeks later that we were out ranked by Yahoo News.

But that very success has led to some frustration. Evidently others are figuring it out, too. Other webmasters are coming here and spamming our comment area with product links for all kinds of elixirs that promise one thing or another, or products that you wouldn’t possibly buy for anyone you actually care about.

Since Google bases part of its ranking algorithm on how many sites link to yours, people are in search of popular sites to get a link (or semi-popular ones like ours that happen to be whored by search engines across the globe). If they fail at finding a site to give them a link, they find a site like ours to somehow spam, in the hopes that we won’t notice. We do notice. And it gets that person a ban.

Yes, Google (and many other search engines) love us. Partly because part of my job is Search Engine Optimization and I know how to build SE friendly sites. The real reason is we’ve been doing this for four years now, and search engines love real content. We have four years of posts and columns - practically the length of a set of encyclopedias.

So here is the point of my post. Good SEO requires patience and good site content. Spamming links on other sites gets you banned, or at least it will here. We are not here to help you sell your products. (Though we are all web and marketing professionals, so if you want to hire us?). We are here for intellectual conversation about current, and sometimes not-so-current, topics. All we ask is that you join in and have fun.

Take your time, like I did, to learn about SEO and become a student of that technology. Don’t spam us thinking we won’t notice because we do. And we’ll ban you for it.

As an added feature to help make our lives here easier (and spam free) we have added a BlackList spam filter to the site, built by Jay Allen. Check out further info here and donate to the cause.

My favorite part is that it allows us to web publish any porn spammer that decides to hit our site again. Yes, that’s right, you porn spam us and we can spread the word to other blacklist users quickly.