Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts
How to not make friends and influence rankings. Ben Michel contributes an update to the search-engine optimization (SEO) contest mentioned last month, the object of which was for contestants to create a site ranked highest by google for a nonsense phrase, "nigritude ultramarine."
Michel writes "The first phase of the competition ended last Monday, and the winner was the owner of a forum called nigritude ultramarine--previously known as Merkey.net. According to Brandon Suit, the owner of this forum, the key to his winning strategy was "getting high PR backlinks"--having other websites with high Page Ranks link to him and vice versa.
What impact does this have on SEO, and indeed for the rapidly growing search industry in general? The viability of certain underhanded methods in the pursuit of SEO has been clearly reinforced by many of the results of the contest--both Suit and his closest competitor, Philipp Lenssen, posted links in Wiki Sandboxes in order to better their standing. According to Suit, "If you want to manipulate [Google], you can." While search engines certainly have come a long ways from relevance-based searching, it seems that they still have significant changes to make before they can more accurately order results for any given query. The search engines' creators themselves must make countless revisions in their own, perhaps quixotic, quests to create the perfect tools to retrieve relevant data in the vast, ever-expanding realm of the internet."
However, not everyone is as matter-of-fact about this method of increasing search-engine visibility; May Kasahara is one of the webmasters and wiki users who isn't.
Kasahara writes: "The Search Engine Optimization contest previously mentioned on Slashdot has had a detrimental effect on wiki users and admins (including myself) lately , as the words 'Nigritude Ultramarine' have been showing up in wiki sandboxes across the web. A search on UseModWiki's homepage brought me to this informative entry, which in turn led me to Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect [note -- mentioned last week on Slashdot] and to these accompanying comments, mostly from very annoyed wiki users."
OK, so maybe "infinite" was a strong word. Prof.Phreak writes "Quoting wikipedia: On May 26, 2004, Richard Arenstorf of Vanderbilt University submitted a 38-page proof that there are, in fact, infinitely many twin primes. On June 3, Michel Balazard of Bordeaux reported that Lemma 8 on page 35 is false.[1] As is typical in mathematical proofs, the defect may be correctable or a substitute method may repair or replace the defect. Arenstorf withdrew his proof on June 8, noting "A serious error has been found in the paper, specifically, Lemma 8 is incorrect"."
What are these dashed lines all over your sacred cow? reifman writes "Slashdot's link to my article in the Seattle Weekly helped generate 175,000 page views and numerous letters and comments. The article seemed to touch a nerve in the Mac and Linux communities. I've posted a follow up responding to people's letters."
Updates from the Academic Affairs Division. zenrandom writes "As Case Western has just recently been reported, we may as well mention the initiative that will be connecting many schools in Ohio. Oarnet, a part of the Ohio Supercomputer Center and The Ohio State University is building a statewide academic and research fiber optic network. Composed of multiple metro-rings and over 1600 miles of fiber."
In unrelated college news, Mirell writes "After the FBI previously investigated an open records request filed for the tunnel blueprints at UT, students decide instead to enter via brute force. Hooligans - 1, War Against Terror - 0."
The problem with opening Pandora's Box. WC writes "The previous review on JDS2 ended with no successful installation so it wasn't very helpful on what to expect from the Sun distro. This new review has got a working installation but with a slew of new problems: more installation woes, unusable networking, buggy Nautilus and Mozilla window resizing artifacts among others. The author concludes that JDS2 is --effectively-- nothing but JDS 1.1 with the added Sun server software on top, but the desktop part has the same (and more) issues like JDS1 had."
Looking innocent is not their strong suit. tbase writes "As reported on News.com.com, Claria, formerly known as Gator, has sued L.L. Bean, charging the retailer with filing a frivolous lawsuit against its advertisers. As covered in a previous Slashdot story, L.L. Bean has filed suit against current and former Claria advertisers for advertising via pop ups over L.L. Bean's site."
I am a member of the merkey.net forums. While it is (probably) a good thing to have a Slashdot article, it was really annoying to have "nigritude ultramarine" posted everywhere on our forums for two months. All that for an iPod and a monitor too...
In any case, Microsoft has given software away for ages. Suddenly because they gave away IE, the world is on track to become evil purveyors of stolen... things.
If that isn't ironic I don't know what is.
You would think that someone like Sun has nerves,resources,etc. to pull a decent Linux desktop.
The reasons it is not are probably combination of:
internal apathy of the development group - Linux, desktop, whatever.. Any AC from Sun can comment?
cluelessness of the upper management - there is no marketing plan, they just grasping the straws
wrong marketing (different from cluelessness). Wtf it is called "Java"? To me, JDS would mean a Swing-based desktop shell on top of very thin Linux distro. Now, that would be innovation.
Overall, the JDS just confirms the point that you do not have to be a multi-billion-dollar co to produce major product and when you ARE a m-b-d co, your product may still suck. The innovation is the field owned by talented individuals and hungry startups.
Jesus, does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?
Whatever happened to harmless breaking and entering? Really, what the hell is the impotent Homeland Security department going to do? Guard the tunnel entrances? Overreact and send the students to Git-mo?
Terrorism is old and busted, and is nothing but a political tool and soundbite op.
Those who respond, "tell that to the victims of 9-11", I submit that if all those people were here today they would be pretty fucking pissed at all the unconstitutional bullshit that has been done in their name.
...does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?
Only so long as it works...
Remember It's for the children! ?
<grrr>
Someone learning might want to test ceating outside links. I think the noindex option is better so that sandboxes are invisible to the google bots.
Whatever happened to harmless breaking and entering?
You mean like, what it clearly states the students were charged with at the beggining of the article?
Really, what the hell is the impotent Homeland Security department going to do?
Nothing, I'd assume, since the article makes no mention of the Homeland Security department, the FBI, the Austin Joint Terrorism Task Force any other government organzation, and that quote was made by the "associate director of utilities and energy management" at the college, not a government official.
Guard the tunnel entrances?
Perhaps they're going to do the only thing that they feel they need to do to make secuirty adequate, which is seal up all the tunnel entrances.
Links could create a bogus page like:
you have linked to the URL: http://somesite.wherever.net
That's not very helpful because it would be difficult to test the link that way. The idea is to encourage legitimate users to actually make and edit pages.
It is unfortunate that Wiki site administrators have to do anything at all. Phillip admits that he does not get it:
I still don't understand why something like a newsgroup alt.test could possibly be hurt from anything (spam, backlink-postings, whatever) but I guess I still don't get it.
Phill, baby, it's rude to use other people and expect them to clean up your mess. As many of the posters stated, Wiki administrators did not set up their service for your purposes and you caused them grief. I can't believe you said this after apologizing.
He also insults Wiki software itself:
In any case it seems Wiki software is not up to handle these things.
Bad attitude, Phill. You bragged about how clever you were, how about comming up with a solution instead? Someone might even give you an ipod or something.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some poor grad student isn't gonna be very much liked by his board. They usually have grad students bitch out lemmas like this - but I might be wrong. If I'm right though, some poor schlub is being handed a Master's and shown the door. Piled Higher and Deeper indeed.
friends don't let friends use linearly dependent row vectors.
I think a better option is a meta tag that lets search engines know that there's user contributed content on the page.
.sig
(Or maybe something in robots.txt)
Google could still index the page, but weigh links on the page lower.
-- not a
You mean NoFollow, Index, surely?
It's like the Reichstags fire in the Weimar Republic (Germany). Blamed on "them nasty jews" and used as an excuse to round up undesireables and put them into concentration camps. You'll eventually find out that America is not one iota better, and that you have given up just as many rights as the Germans did in 1933. Sure, sure, you are still allowed to vote; but as long as they count the votes what are you going to do about it?
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
The latter is also far more powerful. robots.txt was created brain-dead.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
No, I think I'd rather have a successful waffler than a miserable failure who makes himself the laughing-stock of the world with his malapropisms. Give us a president that even the French can respect, and we'll see a lot less anti-Americanism...