That’s it. I’m fed up now. I’m going to throw my toys out of the pram.

STILL no phone and therefore no internet on my PC.

Yesterday, I needed to download a royalty-free image from a website, then email it to the guy who’s printing my new business cards.

With PC and Internet, this task would have taken all of three minutes.

As it was…

Nil desperandum, I thought jovially, first thing in the morning. I shall go into town and into Waitrose where there is free wifi. There, I shall write my blog and sort out the image problemette.

The image wouldn’t download onto my iPad.

So that was 2 x 4 miles driving and an hour more or less wasted.

In the afternoon, my lovely neighbour Wendy invited me round to use HER internet. I struggled a bit with Joe’s Apple Mac, but – hooray – downloaded the image and sent it off. Yeah! Another hour gone, but YEAH!

WRONG! There was no image attached to my email, apparently, even though I could see that there was one from my end.

At home again, fiddled about with my phone, fiddling being the appropriate word because my fingers are, like, NORMAL fingers, whereas mobile phone keypads are designed for insects. Success! The image sent. At last! Only took about half an hour of blood, sweat and tears.

WRONG! The image I’d sent was a jpg, not the vector image required. That was still on Joe’s Mac. The download consisted of two images – a jpg and an eps. I had never heard of an eps and thought the jpg was the right one.

I phoned Joe and asked him to mail the eps image. Phew! That was quick. HOORAY!

WRONG. The email never arrived.

At about 9 p.m. I used my pudgy fingers to send my log-in details for the image providers.

MAYBE…that will work. I have yet to hear.

Resourceful Caroline Coxon is sitting outside dog training classes in her car with her iPad.

I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED!

If you’re a techie, or expecting some sort of highly knowledgeable cyber geekery from this blog, then stop reading straight away.

I AM NOT A TECHIE. OR A GEEK. OR A NERD. As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly interested in HOW things are done, but more in WHY and what effect it has on me and people like me.

This is about my level:

www.livescience.com

So, in my exploration, yesterday, of duplicate content, which was about human copying and pasting, I also came across something called web scraping. To me, a woman of a certain age, this had the flavour of some sort of gynaecological procedure. It seemed to me it could be just about as unpleasant.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is an automated way of taking content from one web site for use on another. You can buy software to do it. It’s most often carried out by owners of spam sites wanting a free source of published content to attract new visitors. A guy called Dave Crader, from Evolve Creative Group – professional web design and online marketing services – was one victim of web scraping, and here’s how he described the people who did it:  “Low-life scumbags who don’t have the creative skill to write their own material.” I cannot but agree.

Why else do people use web scraping?

Of course, search engines use web scraping to build up an index of pages  so that when you search for something specific, the most useful pages pop up at the top – but I’m talking about business reasons.

• To glean business intelligence data about your competitors – for instance, the prices they are charging, so you can set your own price structure to undercut them.
• To acquire information about other people’s customers from forums, blogs and discussion sites – so you can target them yourselves.
• To identify evolving  search engine traffic patterns and online advertising trends
• To capture contact information

These reasons for web scraping don’t seem despicable to me. (See, I’m in danger of becoming  a hardened business woman!) Stealing other people’s content to publish on your own site does.

bloggingnik.com

That’s the copywriter in me speaking.

I’m not ENTIRELY naive.

I do have Spam Filters, which seem to…well, filter spam, by and large.

It’s not infallible but, even so, I consider myself to be pretty spam-savvy. I laugh in the face of spammers!

If I get a comment on my blog asking ‘Do you want to lose weights?’ I’m not rushing to click a link through to whatever it is. Instead,  I am chuckling to myself whilst pressing the ‘delete forever’ button and thinking, ‘If I wanted to lose weights, I’d just leave them lying around at the gym.’

But some of these spammers are cunning beasties. Oh yes, they are.

They know how to flatter my ego.

So, on Friday, this comment appeared on one of my blogs, ready for me to moderate:

“Nice blog here! Also your web site loads up very fast! What host
are you using? Can I get your affiliate link to your host? I
wish my web site loaded up as fast as yours lol”

It was from some guy called Saul Whitcroft.

I was beaming. My little heart felt all aglow with pride. I called to tell Tim, who built my website. Even he was momentarily taken in.

There is no nice guy called Saul Whitcroft. It was spam. I only had to hover over the link to see its origin, which wasn’t Saul Whitcroft’s hotmail account. Don’t ask me what the site was; NO WAY did I want to give them the satisfaction of clicking on the link to find out.

Spammers, somewhere, did this, with the sole intention of increasing traffic to a website. These clever geek-types/unscrupulous reptiles develop hacks which artificially boost a website’s search engine relevance and so it goes higher in Google rankings – and so it becomes more visible to more people – and so…more profitable?

It’s quite possible that the original client doesn’t know this is what’s happening in his name. It’s quite possible that he’s paid loads of money to a company selling SEO and content marketing, but doesn’t actually check (or care?) how they go about it, as long as his Google analytics show that more visitors are coming to his site.

Tell you what,  though. What sort of impression does it give of you as someone in business, of you as a HUMAN BEING? Am I going to be happy to give you my custom  if you endorse, at best, annoying,  at worst, UNETHICAL traffic-building tactics?

A massive, resounding…

TAKE THAT, you spammers. Except they don’t care, because they’re probably doing it for someone else.

So what can we do?

1. For me, it’s useful to understand WHY spammers do what they do. I will be less easily taken in now. Knowledge is power.
2. As a website owners, DON’T indulge in these underhand tactics to get more traffic to your site
3. Absolutely DON’T pay somebody to do it for you. You’re just as culpable if you do that.

INSTEAD – write compelling, valuable copy that makes people keen to spend time with you.