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

Cyberneighborhood Not-Watch?

[raehl]

In the real world, there are neighborhood watch signs to "deter" criminals.

Perhaps there could be a command in the robots.txt file which says "Browse my site, but don't count any links here for page ranking"? That would make your site less of a target for spammers, but not prevent you from being ranked at all.

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

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.

Complacency

[faust2097]

Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this?

It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.

But they're too busy making an email application with 9 frames and 200k of Javascript to pay attention to the reason people use them in the first place. It's a little disappointing, I'm an AltaVista alumni and I got to watch them forget about search and do a bunch of useless crap instead, then die. I was hoping Google would be different.

Re:Why just wikis?

[caino59]

We, for one, saw how the SCO joke (litigious b'turds) managed to GoogleBomb SCO in first place without a problem.

You forgot the link: Litigious Bastards

Re:Why just wikis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not normal discussion boards and blogs?

As an employee of JBOSS, I'm shocked and appalled at your suggestion. Fortunately, JBOSS is working on a new JBOSS solution to overcome this problem using JBOSS. We at JBOSS are passionate that our JBOSS technology will prevent even non- JBOSS users from taking advantage of boards this way.

Frank Lee Awnist
JBOSS Employee
JBOSS Inc.

JBOSS JBOSS JBOSS

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?

Re:visual security code for sign-up

[stevey]

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 ..

Re:Why just wikis?

[clarkcox3]

That's just irresponsible. By putting that link there (the one that says Litigious Bastards), you're contributing to the problem.

Again, responsible people do not put "Litigious Bastards" links in their slashdot posts.

Think about it? How would you like a google search for Litigious Bastards to point to your company, leading everyone to think that you and your co-workers are nothing but a bunch of Litigious Bastards?