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'Online Poker' Googlebomb
Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."
The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google.
And the Wikipedia page is not protected right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism.
Am I the only one who saw a fucking DISTURBING image when loading this page?
Or is the "Online Poker" page redirecting to a picture of a guy trying to suck his own penis? I'm not being a troll, trying to be funny, nothing, I'm being serious...
Did someone rig the page to redirect to that or something? Because I was expecting text, not... disturbing... pictures.
The link is now a pciture of someonee fellating themselves.
Wouldn't it be better to implement the rel="nofollow" for these links? After all, they should be trying to punish the spammers, not reward Wikipedia (which is good but doesn't help with the spam problem).
The current link to Online Poker in Wikipedia is redirecting me to something I'd rather never have seen.
Here's the Google Cache of the actual Wikipedia article (until somebody over there figures out why I was sent to an auto-fellatio site)
If you blog it...
Rusty on k5 recently pointed out an interesting scam that works against captchas like this.
Apparently spammers were putting up free porn sites, but to get the free porn you had to enter the answers to captcha prompts that were scraped from other sites. People love their porn, so this gave them thousands of valid captcha responses.
People in these industries are evil, yet seemingly very creative.
RYOFA (Read your own fricking article)
Bloggers bug me. The caption should be understandable by blog-free geeks, not just those on the inside. A concise one sentence explanation clearly describing WHY the bloggers are doing this would make the whole thread much more useful. As it is, I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why bloggers were googlebombing the wiki. Please, when a reason exists for some fact, state the damn reason clearly! Example: Bloggers, frustrated by poker sites posting spam in the comments sections which follow blog entries, decided to fight back by displacing comment-spammer's rank in google searches. .... then insert the rest of the caption.
;-)
And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.
Grrrrrr. How's that for bitterness!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Wow! time to change my slashdot sig!
I know, I'll buy Goat.cx and redirect it to a poker site.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Well, for everyone else, here are some strategies to combat comment spam. There should be plugins or upgrades available for whatever software you're using that add these features:
1) Add ref="nofollow" to all links posted. Google will then ignore this link when assigning pagerank. This is invisible to the user.
2) Force the browser to calculate a javascript hash everytime a comment is posted. This prevents automated spambots from posting comments. This is invisible to the user.
3) Filter for common words (viagra, poker) then manually approve those comments. This is a lot of work for you, but no work for your users.
4) Use captchas - your users must type in the text in pictures when posting a comment. This is extremely intrusive for your users.
5) Approve every comment. Lots of work for you.
6) Disable comments. It's better than giving up your blog as, sadly, many people are choosing to do.
Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox posted today:
It's quite possible for an intelligent player to make money playing poker in the long run. This is because you are playing against your opponents, not the house. Your opponents will likely make mistakes that you can profit from. True, the house takes a portion of the money from each pot, but a skilled player can usually overcome the rake for a decent winrate. If all players are equally skilled, they will all lose money.
Not necessarily. Putting the period inside the double quotes is accepted American (and I think Canadian) usage.
British people, and most other English speakers elsewhere in the world, put the full stop outside the quotes.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Add the nofollow tag to your links in the HTML code and spammer won't benefit from their spam campaigns. Many major logs, wikis, guestbook programs have started this practice.
But the spammer doesn't care. They don't check if you're using nofollow, they just vandalise your comments and run. Thinking nofollow will stop this type of spam is akin to thinking spam assassin or dnsBLs stop spammers. It hasn't, it just means the crud doesn't end up in your inbox.
I've ended up having a little database which holds both referral spammers and comment spammer URLs, so anyone who either tries to send an http request with a site listed as the HTTP referrer or post a comment with those sites in gets redirected to a permission denied page.
But I could do that because I'm vain enough to roll my own code (and embarassing it is too). Most bloggers will have to wait for their blog software authors to add something like that and then for their hosts to update.
Now what we really need is something akin to the SURBL where blog spam and referral spam urls end up, then plugins for every major blog engine out there to use it.
If you search for "HTTP", you get as first choice the Microsoft Website, which is a bit of an irony. The proper result should be http://www.w3.org/
Why this matters?
Because when you just type "http" in the address bar of Firefox and press enter, it takes you directly to Microsoft!
In addition, if a URL is malformed, such as "http://http://www.slashdot.org/", it tries to resolv "http" and takes you to Microsoft. Try with Slashdot.org.