Policy Change on Posting SEO, Self Serving and/or Spam Content
Hi everyone!
In recent months we have seen a significant increase in self-serving content and spam. For those of you who have posted your own content on Snapzu and are wondering what has been happening lately, I will explain.
We have tweaked our anti-spam functionality to be more sensitive towards the blatant posting of SEO content. It is considered self serving to game our community for the purpose of helping your website in search rankings. We have added/tweaked additional measures like only assigning do-follow links to highly up voted content, as well as un-publishing or even deleting snaps/text posts, domain blocking and or IP banning accounts that abuse our content creation and sharing policies. If your account is engaged in posting content meant to game our system for the purpose of SEO, blatant spamming, or other content marketing activity that may jeopardize the well being of our community, please know that we will do everything in our power to remove such content and prevent it from happening again.
Please note that members who follow the 10% self-serving sharing rule may continue to engage with our community just as before, but if you feel you may be breaking the rules or have received a system message warning you that you have, you can PM me and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
The last thing we want is to be overrun by spam. There are too many great social websites that have failed because little to nothing was done about such content. If you have something to say in regards to this, be sure to post in the comments. Our stance on this is clear, we are however looking for any feedback to better our approach.
Thanks all!
Join the Discussion
Good news! Now I can add my music in peace!!!!
Thank you for this. Other than downvoting and selecting "spam", is there a preferred way to flag you (or anyone you designate as an admin) to manually review a post or user?
Also, does the 10% rule apply to OC that is hosted only on Snapzu? This is content that doesn't link elsewhere but instead makes use of the modules available for a snap. For instance, if someone here were into crafts and posted only guides to making stuff with the pictures, text, etc. all using modules, would this be spam?
Generally the down votes are the only way to flag content at this point. We may in the future add a distinct flag option that can be directed at an admin that oversees the community as a whole. Hosting self serving content on Snapzu is the same as linking to it, so yes the 10% rule will also apply. As for creating content about the things that interest you, it doesn't break the 10% rule unless the content posted is obviously created for the purpose of marketing. The main goal is not to let marketers/seo specialists/marketers over run Snapzu with spam and self serving content. We have seen websites like chime.in go down hill and fall apart within months into a spam fest due to rules like these not being enforced.
Thanks for the update.
If have a question. When the site is big enough, there will be a lot of content creators who come to the site. These people will also want to keep their private life separate from the content. For example, it is assumed that on reddit that most celebrities that use reddit (regularly) will use a private account for private things besides content promotion and AMA. Will you guys ensure these peoples privacy? Personally, if I was a celebrity, I'd be turned off of a site if I was forced to follow the 10% rule if I'm ALREADY following it on a different account.
Good question. I think we will cross that bridge when we get there.
I will say one thing however to clarify. Snapzu isn't reddit, and while we may have some similar aspects to functionality, we don't wish to follow that exact path. We do everything we can to protect privacy now, and we plan to continue to do so. However if someone wants to create multiple accounts to post self serving content on one and be an active / contributing member on the other we will naturally have a problem with that. We consider celebrities as people too, and we won't treat them any different than any other contributing members. If they wish to interact as themselves without using an anonymous username, thats fine, we can't stop them, but we are not about to bend the rules for celebrities anymore than we would bend the rules for an SEO marketer.
In the future as we build additional tools and expand on the concept we will of course be able to highlight our rules more clearly.
And this is why you can't chase me away from here with a big stick.
I have a question, I create websites for the purpose of writing and/or creating environments for story telling, these sites contain Adsense ads, are sites like these considered Spam sites. These sites don't contain any self promotion other than links to other sites of mine with related content to the site containing the links. I'm not selling anything just giving info or telling stories. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure what a Spam site is. Any help in getting my head around this will be appreciated. Cause I think I really like Snapzu and don't want to get into trouble. Thanks
That sounds interesting! Simply having ads on a blog doesn’t make it blogspam. More important, I think, is whether the content is interesting. If you’re posting a blog entry of yours someplace it’s well-received and spot on-topic, then it’s not spam. If you post the same thing somewhere and it’s overwhelmingly unpopular, even if it was on-topic, it’d count as spam. Not a concrete definition, but a useful one.
For years, Snapzu’s had a 10%-sharing rule. Upshot being that what you submit at Snapzu ought to be things that don’t happen to be yours generally, except for maybe one out of ten snaps. It’s not a hard and fast rule in every case. Mostly depends how good the content is. With more blogs signing up for Snapzu to find eyeballs, that rule could change. Still, spam will need downvoting to keep it from clogging the feed, and you’ll be able to identify what’s spam by the downvotes, but I’m sure that quality, interesting content’s going to do fine.
Very curious to see what you’ve got in mind. Nice to almost, kind-of, sorta, meet you! Welcome to Snapzu!
Thanks for the welcome. To learn to write well one must write and receive feedback, this is one of the reasons I'm here at Snapzu. Also I want to stimulate the minds of my readers. But as you can see Spam is an interesting problem. I view all advertising as Spam, but advertising is the driving force of the Internet and the world. But to stay safe I'll go by the 10% rule. Thanks for the reply.
Adolph Ochs would tell us “advertising in the final analysis should be news.” Ads that aren’t, those are spam.
[This comment was removed]