

Ask HN: SEO Mystery - What's this 'MarchSEO' guy up to? - brandnewlow

Rule #1 on the web: Anyone with "SEO" in their username is not to be trusted.<p>Some guy named "MarchSEO" is posting links to one of my stories on lots of social news sites.  I don't know who this person is.  I think it's some sort of SEO scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is.  Help?<p>The situation<p>Exhibit #1. I published a story Tuesday about the Pittsburgh Samaritan:<p>http://www.windycitizen.com/news/04/14/2009/pittsburgh-samaritan-chicago<p>Exhibit #2: Someone named MarchSEO posted it to some random site called BizSugar:<p>http://www.bizsugar.com/NewsandPolitics/The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video/<p>Exhibit #3: They've posted it to about 6 other social news-type sites.  Check out the Google results for "Pittsburgh Samaritan"<p>http://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+samaritan&#38;ie=utf-8&#38;oe=utf-8&#38;aq=t&#38;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&#38;client=firefox-a<p>My article (thankfully!) is the first result, but almost every result after that leads to a social news site where this "MarchSEO" character has posted the story.<p>What the heck is happening here?  Could one company own all these sites and be trying to muscle everyone else out for this weird search?
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alex_c
Hmm. Only hypothesis I have is that person is trying to build up legit-looking
accounts on social news sites by submitting random stuff, so that the links
they want to promote don't get recognized as such when they get submitted? (in
which case, the "SEO" in the username is a bit puzzling, because it's not very
subtle).

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quizbiz
Pardon me but isn't this the point of social news sites? To spread the word
about issues, articles, etc. If you didn't post the articles on all these
different sites, why can't he?

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brandnewlow
Here are the rest of the sites:

[http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic-
tale-o...](http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic-tale-of-the-
pittsburgh-samaritan-pics-video/)

<http://tipd.com/tag/pittsburgh+samaritan>

[http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of-
the-...](http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of-the-
pittsburgh-samaritan-pics--video/)

[http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pitt...](http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video)

<http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/latest-activity-16>

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vaksel
maybe you have an alter ego that posts the stuff when you "sleep". Check the
timestamp on all those posts and see if thats the case.

although that bizsugar name sounds familiar, I believe someone on here runs
that.

~~~
brandnewlow
if this guy really wanted to mess with me, he would have chosen an anagram for
my name as his username.

~~~
andrew_welbon
That's ridiculous... who would bother to think up an anagram just for a
pointless joke?

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acro
I don't think there is a scam, he is just submitting interesting content to
build up his profile. He didn't copy the articles, at least the couple of
submissions i checked. Its good for you, its good for him, whats the problem?

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qeorge
(S)he's probably building an autosubmitter of some kind, and testing it using
arbitrary stories.

You're getting a ton of free links, so it can't hurt you. I wouldn't worry
about it.

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rms
I think he is testing those sites to see if any of them outranked you, or to
see how they rank in comparison to each other. Since you're #1, I wouldn't
worry about it.

~~~
brandnewlow
Ah. Ok, that would make sense.

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checkwit
his sites don't have to rank #1 to get traffic. also other search engines
might rank his sites higher. he's trying to get content to his site.

