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.

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?

The situation

Exhibit #1. I published a story Tuesday about the Pittsburgh Samaritan:

http://www.windycitizen.com/news/04/14/2009/pittsburgh-samaritan-chicago

Exhibit #2: Someone named MarchSEO posted it to some random site called BizSugar:

http://www.bizsugar.com/NewsandPolitics/The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video/

Exhibit #3: They've posted it to about 6 other social news-type sites. Check out the Google results for "Pittsburgh Samaritan"

http://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+samaritan&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

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.

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?

[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).

[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?

[brandnewlow]

Here are the rest of the sites:

http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic-tale-o...

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

http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of-the-...

http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pitt...

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

[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 → vaksel]

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

[andrew_welbon → brandnewlow]

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

[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?

[kf]

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 → kf]

Ah. Ok, that would make sense.

[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.

[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.