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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."
Why not normal discussion boards and blogs? We, for one, saw how the SCO joke (litigious b'turds) managed to GoogleBomb SCO in first place without a problem.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
What happened to the nice internet we had in 1996?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
...what Google needs? A "Was this result helpful in your search?" button for each link returned, so that the search itself also influences page ranks. Maybe that will help get rid of this Google bombing mess.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Google's algorithm isn't the problem. The problem is the availability of easily abused areas such as these "sandboxes."
Some search engines accept any old site. Others accept sites based on human approval and categorization. Google is a nice combination of the two - by using outside references (counting how often the site is linked) it assumes that the site is more relevant. Because other people have put links on their sites. That's a human factor, without directly using human beings to review and categorize the sites and rankings.
Sure it can be abused, but it's not Google's fault; perhaps these areas of abuse (blogs, wikis, etc.) should address the problems from their end.
As a sidenote, I think that with recent Wiki abuse, the issue of open wikis will become a similar one to open proxies and mail relays.
I've noticed that my blog's getting lots of spam from sites that don't seem like typical spam sites....
From what I can see, it looks like those "search ranking professionals" who "guarantee to raise your google rank in 30 days" are using blog spamming, and perhaps Wiki Spamming as a way to increase their clients ratings.
It's not about meta tags, or submitting anymore... it's spamming.
Perhaps it's time for people to finally be warry of these services. After all, can a third party really guarantee a position in another companies search index?
IMHO those services are pure evil. They either do nothing, or they do something to increase page rank... what is that "something"? How many options do they have?
If they are going to use my blog... why can't I get a cut in that business?
Why not put the sandbox in it's own folder and add an entry to the robots.txt telling it not to browse that folder?
But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank.
The Arch Wiki has sufferred several times from such vandals in the past few months. I'm sure other wikis have, too. They create links over single spaces or dots, so that casual readers don't notice them. Attentively watching the RecentChanges page is the most effective way to find and fight them, but this is tiresome. I guess many wikis will require posters to be authenticated soon, which is a blow in the wiki ideal, but not such a major blow. Alternatively, maybe someone will develop heuristics to fight the most common abuses (e.g. external link over a single space).
So, this is not new, but this is now news.
There was a story about defeating this system on /. a while back.
Rather than using OCR or anything poeople would merely harvest a load of images from a signup site - possible when there are only a given number of finite images, or when there is a consistent naming policy.
Then once the images were collected they would merely setup an online porn site, asking people to join for free proving they were human by decoding the very images they had downloaded.
Human lust for porn meant that they could decode a large number of these images in a very short space of time, then return and mount a dictionary attack...
Quite clever really, sidestepping all the tricky obfuscation/OCR problems by tricking humans into doing their work for them ..
This fails to address the real issue.
That is, even if you make your links useless (easy with a no-follow meta tag) it wont help, the majority of this spam is AUTOMATED, and will spam your wiki/blog/guestbook based on simple page queues.
Your best personal defense is to manually remove any page or html queues that a spammer would pick up on as being common to a certain type of postable web page or element.
Bloggers have been creating blacklists (banning both poster ips and destination urls) with some degree of success. This is a deterrent, having a spammer show up on a blacklist whereby webmasters use a distributed file to 'clean' their blogs automatically.
Well, why not link SCO to something the reader gets real value from? Some page where they can learn something about SCO? After all, since those pages indeed tell something about SCO and therefore contain the word SCO, it should even be more effective.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.