Are you paying someone to do this?

The IPKat spends a good deal of time, as has been mentioned in the past, deleting spam, junk, phoney comments, irrelevant and unsolicited advertisements and feeble attempts at search engine optimisation.  He has just received yet another one, purportedly from a patent attorney who, according to his website, also practises in the fields of "personal Injury, car accident, construction, accident, drunk driving, accident, wrongful death, slip and fall, pedestrian accident, taxi accident,  premises liability".

This is what the Kat, moderating readers' comments, found among the unmoderated comments awaiting him this evening:
attorney-online.info has left a new comment on your post "AIPPI calls for CJEU status quo in unitary patent ...":  
I like your legal articles, especially ones regarding patent law, copyright etc. Patent law issues are very complicated, but you make them absolutely clear. If you are a practicing patent attorney, please submit you contacts to my attorney directory. I invite there only best lawyers and make detailed descriptions about their services and practice areas. For example, look at the category with NY patent attorneys http://attorney-online.info/dir/patent/new_york/947 I wish more people to be listed there to provide a good choice for people who need high quality legal services. 
This Kat has no idea whether the patent attorney in question has sought to post this comment beneath the post in question, or indeed whether he does indeed practise in all those areas.  Nor does he know whether the advertisement is intended to promote the attorney in question or Attorney Online (which, when the IPKat visited its primarily US-oriented website, was also carrying an advertisement for a substantial English law firm, Irwin Mitchell) . What he does know is that, on occasions in the past when he has contacted individual lawyers or law firms whose names have been linked to text of this nature, they invariably disclaim any knowledge of such material and insist that they certainly never authorised it. Curiously, after the Kat has expressed his indignation, the unwanted posts cease with immediate effect.

Someone must be doing this, since it these comments are unlikely to be entirely self-generating  -- and someone is presumably getting paid for doing it.  Moreover, someone expects to get the benefit from it.

This Kat has occasionally seen, and indeed received, advertisements offering excellent pay to anyone willing to do some "writing for the internet" from the comfort of their own home, with no previous experience or qualification required.  Are the people who answer those advertisements the same people who are writing and attempting to post material of this nature in an attempt to raise the web profile of an SEO client?  Or merely seeking to gain some free advertising? It would be good to know.
Are you paying someone to do this? Are you paying someone to do this? Reviewed by Jeremy on Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. This site has been registered by:

    Name:Kemskyj Sergij Oleksandrovych
    Street: Zhovtneva st. 50a-10
    City: Korosten
    State/Province: Zhytomyr Oblast
    Postal Code: 11500
    Country: Ukraine
    Phone: +380.983422723
    Email: kemskiy@gmail.com

    That is the only public answer. His means, motivation or employment have to be asked or guessed.

    A robot can have easily been used, crawling the web for expression "patent law" for eg.

    Ads seem to come from googleAds. It can be guessed that it is a way to earn some quick money everytime someone click on them.

    Remember the Telecoms Package, voted by European Parliament in 2009? Beside the famous amendment 138, there were some provisions against spam:

    "Article 15 3. Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing, in cases other than those referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2, are not allowed either without the con­ sent of the subscribers or users concerned or in respect of subscribers or users who do not wish to receive these communications, the choice between these options to be deter­ mined by national legislation, taking into account that both options must be free of charge for the subscriber or user."

    How has this directive been implemented in UK?

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Gibus: thanks so much for your very helpful comment. I believe that the UK is up-to-date with its telecoms implementations. The problem, though, is how to achieve effective enforcement ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unfortunately, by linking to the quoted page in your blog post, you are boosting the ranking of that page in search engines by implicit endorsement from a high-traffic, highly-rated blog. You are also likely driving eyeballs to that page. This, ultimately, is what the spammers want, and, in truth, now seem to have achieved.

    ReplyDelete

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