Slashdot Mirror
'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."
Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?
It don' make no sense!
It goes to #1.
Google Bombing is used to get your one page higher, it doesn't do anything to the other sites' ranking except to the single site you may displace off the top 10 results.
Yes, I read the article. This seems to be a "fight fire with fire" solution and is probably just going to make things worse.
The stupid online poker comment spam *is* annoying, yes, but is Googlebombing Wikipedia really a viable solution?
The Wiki didn't come up 3rd when I looked a few minutes ago (it was 5th) and doesn't Google specifically say "Don't do stuff like this!" in their help documentation?
I hope this doesn't backfire.
I can't see this as a good thing.
1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines.
3. The recent nofollow tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
but how the hell does this help? The online casino people are still going to spam your blog. Just because one link out of the 31 million pages wont deter a user. There are paid ads anyways. This is a waste of time if you ask me. A better way to combat this would be to come together to maybe come up with a plugin or hack to have a 100% system against spam.
So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.
Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.
...has appearantly linked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_poker to "autofellatio.jpg". Wikipedia was a bad choice, what with the inherent ability for *anyone* to alter the page.
I detailed this elsewhere. All Google has to do is add a filter to its results so that pages that do not actually contain the search word/phrases do NOT show up in result lists.
This used to be standard search-engine behaviour, and because of this, results used to be a lot more accurate (unless they were merely outdated, but even in this case, the results were accurate at one time!).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If you really want to thwawt the link spammers, what you need to do is make sure 9 other wikipedia pages also get well linked for the phrase 'online poker', thereby meaning there are no [profitable] spammed linked on the front page of google results.. The pages 'online' and 'poker' would be a good start..
Problem:- the bloggers leave pages open to the public, that anybody can modify, and they get spammed by the poker places.
Solution:- Spam google, so that the highest ranked page on the net for 'online poker' is, you guessed it, a user modifiable page, hosted somewhere else. They have made the wikipedia page the most valuable real-estate on the net regarding the given search term, so, now it's wikipdeia's problem, that page is going to be target of constant spam/attack/redirect attempts.
I would have thought the blog types would understand, and target a static page, where this is not a problem. No, they gotta take the problem from thier insignificant little nothing sites, and turn it into a major problem for one of the most significant sites on the internet. Way to go assholes, what a wonderful way to cause a huge amount of problems for a very valuable net resource, that's done nothing to cause problems for your precious 'blog community'.
There is a reason that most folks find the rantings in blogspace a total waste of otherwise useful bandwidth, this is yet another good example. Only the selfish shortsighted stupidity of the blog community would come up with the idea of solving thier problem, by making a wikipedia problem instead.
That's about as smart as an anvil folks, and it's this kind of stupidity that causes most of the world to view blogspace as wasted space. Whoever came up with the idea of google-bombing the term 'online poker' with a wikipedia page, should be taken out back and strung up. Didn't a single one of the bloggers in question have enough intelligence to figure out how big of a problem this is going to create? Now that wikipedia is in the top page, every poker spammer in the world is going to be trying to hijack that page. Are bloggers in general really this dumb ?
[rant off]