Webmasters Pounce On Wiki Sandboxes

Yacoubean writes "Wiki sandboxes are normally used to learn the syntax of wiki posts. But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank. One such webmaster recently demonstrated this successfully. Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this? I know all the bloggers and wiki maintainers would sure appreciate it."

Comments

Oh well

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Google and others will just lower/diminish the value of links from Wiki pages, just like they did to those open "Guest Book" pages on personal sites.

Not a big deal

[arvindn]

Recently the Chinese wikipedia suffered a spam attack with a distributed network of bots editing articles to add link to some chinese intenet marketing site. In response, the latest version of MediaWiki (the software that runs the wikipedias and sister projects) has a feature to block edits matching a regex (so you can prevent links to a specific domain). Wikis generally have more protection against spamming than weblogs. So I wouldn't worry.

Re:Cyberneighborhood Not-Watch?

[Random Web Developer]

There is a robots meta tag for this that you can put in your headers for a single page (robots.txt needs subdirs) but unfortunately most webmasters are too ignorant to realize the power of these:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

Re:Why just wikis?

[ichimunki]

The real problem with Wikis is that the link will remain there, even after it has been removed from the current page, because most Wikis have a revision history feature. So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).

My wiki got hit by this stupid link, but not in the sandbox. Of course, recovering the previous version of the page is easy... it's wiping out any trace of the lameness that gets trickier. I suppose the easiest way to defeat this would be to require simple registration in order to edit Wiki pages.

What else can we do? Alter the names of the submit buttons and some of the other key strings involved in Editing?

visual security code for sign-up

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Most BB boards (including phpBB, upgrade!) and blogs (including Slashdot) now feature the visual security code for sign-up. But, of course, this does not prevent hand entry of spam...

Re:Why just wikis?

[Eivind]

It's working almost *too* well. Not only are SCO the number one hit for "litigious bastards", but they're also the number one hit for "litigious" or "bastards" alone.

Then again maybe that mostly says something about their popularity.