D360
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Destination360.com ... Roy/SAC edit
Hi Dan,
I believe you confused two different things when you posted your statement at my personal User Talk Page.
First, User:Feezo is watching the activities of your site at Wikipedia.org, not me. Another user posted about the suspicious behavior of an anonymous contributor to Wikipedia. Here is the Link to the Log. The Activity was reported to the Wikipedia SPAM Project here. The anonymous user did hundreds modifications to articles, pretty much always just an addition to the external link section of the article; a link to Destination360.com.
The posts on MY User Talk page are mostly general. It just so happened, that your spam case popped up when I had a general discussion going on at the same "page" about the old recommendation to turn on the rel="no follow" attribute for ALL external links from Wikipedia to anywhere else. This would reduce the interest of White Hat SEO's (which you are) and Black Hat SEO's in Wikipedia to increase targeted incoming links from a trusted source for Google ranking purposes. It was a Text Box Example of a White Hat SEO doing Link Building
I am fairly new to Wikipedia myself and also clashed with the SPAM team very early. Only one Link I defended was for my own gain (link to my blog). All other links were to somebody else's sites. If you want to find out more, check here (3 Paragraphs) about a Link stupid me was adding to the "highly targeted" article for "Blog". The fight for the links in the [Affiliate Marketing] Article (which I partially wrote) will show you, that I was defending ONLY other Sites. The Article did not have a link to any of my sites. Parts of the Discussions are on my Archived Talk Page here , but most can be found at the Talk Page for the "Affiliate Marketing" Article , from here Affiliate marketing Talk to the end of the Page.
I wanted to know how they go about certain things here at Wikipedia. e.g. Tools and Mechanisms. I am still not 100% sure. I certainly did not make progress on finding hard facts about the issue nor any useful tools for analytics and detection. I am not a member of the Wikipedia SPAM Fighter team and would also not remove a lot of the external links they remove, simply because they see an Adsense Ad.
I am in the Internet Marketing Business myself and have no personal or professional problem with your company and websites. Personally I don't even mind the the links to Destination360 that were added. They are in violation of the Wikipedia Guidelines for Wikipedia:External_links and thus considered "SPAM" by Wikipedia (although tons of people would disagree).I believe that most of them are probably okay and add value to the article the "human" visitor would benefit from, if he clicks on the link and to the content at Destination360. I had to learn, that this seems to be secondary for a lot of people at Wikipedia that hold the power (which I do certainly not hold at all).
I wanted to help to reduce the general amount of link spam for search engine ranking purposes. It is right now not more than that. I am not somebody who is removing external links from hundreds of articles. I do have better things to do with my spare time :). I also like to know some numbers regarding spam to evaluate the problem (measure it). I think I summarized it the best when I tried to explain it to JFish. here
The best place for a statement is here, because it is a PROJECT page and not a USER page.
I noticed that you did that already, but you just addressed me and how I use Wikipedia for personal gain ;) (I wish that would be true, actually it is to some extend since all talk and user pages are indexed by Google as well and I have links to my sites on my pages that gain PageRank at the moment. That is the only gain today and the funny thing is, that I am working on eliminating this benefit, which gets bigger and bigger because of all the content I produce during my attempts get stuff moving. That's a Paradox right there. Btw. How the heck is "Wicki Travel"?
Anyhow, what you over read was the most important comment of all: "Yes. His last warning was Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. today at 4:54. Judging by the template messages, he may be blocked if he disregards two more warnings. Feezo (Talk) 06:15, 20 April 2006 (UTC)". wiki/User_talk:Feezo is the one watching you and also removes a lot of your links. He is also the one that warned "you" (as in somebody with responsibility for Destination360) for the second time (meaning somebody got a warning once already). He continues to watch your sites and people and will be able to initiate a permanent ban of any link from Wikipedia to your Site via code if you contine to add more links in the future. So be careful.
If you disagree professionally with any of the statements I made ("RoySAC") regarding SEO and specifically your site or company, let me know. I am not sure which posts on what pages did you read and which not. Did you read this?. Be careful, there are also some comment posts from other Wikipedia users. Actually a full blown discussion. One (me) arguing against Some seniors and Admins.
It's all a little confusing (using a Wiki), I know, because I am still not used to it myself to 100%, but once you get the general idea, you will be fine.
You can shoot me an email, via Wikipedia, or visit my professional homepage at http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/
--roy<sac> Talk! .oOo. 08:00, 26 April 2006 (UTC)