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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."
On one hand, it seems that "stooping" to the level of spammers seems as evil as the spamming itself.
On the other hand, maybe this is an appropriate response -- fighting fire with fire.
Only time will tell if the cure is worse than the disease... but at the moment, I think it's kind of cool to use the spammers' own tactics against them.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Google did a study of how many people used that button. They found it was terribly insignificant, but important to the feel of the Google main page. I can't remember where I heard it of course, but I'm pretty sure it was linked on /.
i'm not sure i follow their logic here... lower the page ranking of the sites that should be higher because they are oft linked to from spam; by google bombing and artificially raising the wiki; which devalues googles results?
I would think bloggers would like google:p
A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase. Google has some great things, like so many more results and caching, but it is annoying to have bogus results come up like this. If they, by default, actually returned only the pages that contained what you were looking for, the googlebombing "abuse" problem would vanish. There is a keyword (either noanchor or inanchor?) that ensures that Google produces accurate, relevante results, but you have to type it in.
Even more importantly, it would get rid of the bogus/irrelevant results in searches and make the search experience a lot better. You'd only get online poker sites containing "onlike poker".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The poker sites themselves are not directly to blame, however it's their affiliate programs such as this one which encourage the spamsters.
As you can see they can be quite lucrative. Spammers also post poker site's software to Usenet and p2p networks together with a bonus code that benefits their account, with some steady play these bonuses can be cleared in no time leaving themselves a tidy profit.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I am sure the bloggers love google and hate seeing spam have large amounts of influence on the results.
Bottles.
The difference in ranking could be due to the fact that there are different google servers around the world. Each one does its own ranking, and different servers can give different results for the same terms.
Willy on Wheels is the ultimate Wikipedia vandal!
I'm not clear why fighting spam-fuelled results is detrimental to google. Personally, I think the encyclopedia page is at least as valuable as whatever online poker service spammed the most.
Stupid.
I've had a lame little blog for the past 9 months or so, mainly just a place for me to repost links for my friends to see. Anyway, in the last 3 months or so the comment spam has been really out of control. I have filters setup in a way that the comment spam never makes it to my page, but what it does do is generate about 100 emails to my admin account everytime that goddamn online poker motherfucker spams my server. Every email reads something like this:
0 .252.73.2
From: xxxx@xxxxxxx.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Message-Id:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:01:45 -0500 (EST)
A new comment on the post #66 "I'm Back" is waiting for your approval
Author : free online poker (IP: 160.252.73.2 , slsconf.shinshu-u.ac.jp)
E-mail : qyhsfto@a5af13b6415e47154138bf629771e475b.com
URL : http://online-----poker.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=16
Comment:
poker tips - WPT, free poker online | poker books - texas holdem, world poker tour | internet poker - partypoker, texas hold'em poker | partypoker - poker books, party poker | poker rooms - poker tournaments, paradise poker | online poker - partypoker, partypoker | poker - poker rules, online poker rooms | empire poker - world poker tour, online poker sites | paradise poker - poker games, internet poker | internet poker - poker stars, paradise poker | poker stars - internet poker, poker tips | world poker tour - poker tips, poker tournaments | poker online - poker chips, poker tips
To approve this comment, visit: http://xxxxxxxxx.com/fakeurl
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Currently 146 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
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[snip]
He does it from zombies so it's a different IP address every time, and recently they've stopped putting anything with the word "poker" in the comments because they figured out that by now most bloggers have the keyword poker filtered and the comments never reach the page.
You know what is the most aggravating thing of all? Even though none of the comments have ever made it through my moderation system, the fuckers still try and spam my server every single day!!! It's aggravating beyond belief and pretty much makes me not want to bother running a blog any more. I guess I can have a little more sympathy for what the Slashdot editors have to put up with (although on a much smaller scale).
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
"nofollow" is not part of W3C's Link Types, but what a heck... we love Google... now, if Microsoft did the same to an open standard, we would tear them apart, wouldn't we?!
It's an interesting exercise in that it weeds out those sites that are aggressively spamming from those that aren't...here's how it works.
If 10,000 bloggers googlebomb using wikipedia and there still remains 5 or 6 links above wikepedia then those links probably are most culpable. At that point you could excise those links using the
various filtering programs.
If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker
If somebody wants to play online poker , Google won't return any Wikipedia pages in the top 10.
which is what the wiki page is displacing.
Not at all. Online poker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia links to seven poker sites.
Did you even try it? I did. The plus makes no difference. Results 8 and 9 do not contain what I was looking for. Besides, having to put + in front of words INSIDE a quote sure is a hassle: is it so hard for a search engine to find the phrase without having to learn complicated rules? Apparently, it is not hard. Long forgottten www.lycos.com produces 100% relevancy in the first 10 results (as opposed to an 80% score for Google). It does not have this proble.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.
One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.
The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Here's one to start: Online poker
Bloggers link to each other so they can find each other, not so they have pagerank coming out of their ass.
Spammers, however, discovered this pagerank, and started abusing it. Google 'solved' this problem by giving bloggers the ability to add a note to a link saying 'Don't give this any pagerank'.
However, spammers, being about as smart as pond scum's waste products, continue to spam blogs, even the ones that had such attributes added automatically. (These are the same people who attempt to deliver mail to hundreds of addresses on my server that do not and never have existed.) Spammers apparently cannot tell blogs apart.
And hence, to force the issue, blogs have started abusing the power themselves. Google now must write something to tell blogs apart from normal websites, or its entire database will be under the control of bloggers, mwhahahahaha.
The hope is that if google fixes this, within two or three years spammers who have been spamming blogs will have drowned by staring up when it's raining or deciding to go outside for a smoke break while on an airplane, and the new crop won't ever have spammed any blogs. (Spammers cannot learn to stop doing things, only to do new things.)
Of course, bloggers may be overestimating the intelligence of spammers by assuming they know how to operate airplane doors or tilt their head back.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Link to Online Poker instead, you miserable failures.
That's a fairly complex process, which is already an excellent deterrent. It doesn't seem very hard to counteract, either. Actually, I can't really fathom how it would work.
(1) You send the blog server a request for the web site containing the form. (2) The server generates a captcha with an associated hash and sends it to you along with the form. (3) You send a request with the decoded captcha, the hash and the form data attached.
Now the process you described would take captcha + hash you receive in 2, and get the decoded image from wherever. Later on, he goes on with 3, using the decoded text. Now my first idea would limit the time that could pass between 2 and 3, and I think that's a viable suggestion - at worst, an innocent poster will surpass the limit because he takes too long to create a post, but that's not a problem, we'll just send him a new captcha which he can decode within seconds.
But in any event, when you try to do 3 (ie post your spam) a normal human will have to do 2 (ie get the form) before that, so the server would know which captcha he sent you last, and sending the hash and decoded text for any other captcha wouldn't work. A script doesn't have to do 2 before doing 3, because a script doesn't manually fill out a form, but that alone is an odd behavious a server could be programmed to pick up. Sending any other decoded captcha than the one received in 2 is ineffective, if step 2 is skipped, then there is no legal captcha and no post. This would prevent "farming" blogs for captchas to be decoded and used at a later stage.
Sorry if I'm not overly clear (to say the least), I hope at least the time limit argument is simple enough to be understood.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Just think... some bastard spams your blog with links to "hotanalonlinepoker.com", so you pay Google thirty bucks to whack that site down one rank whenever the appropriate search is made.
Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors, but... it might still be worth it.
The spammer just queues up what they want to post, and waits...
Then a person comes along for the free porn. The moment they hit the page, the spammers site goes off to yours, gets the Captcha, and the users decodes for porn. Instantly the spammer posts whatever on your site.
So basically you cannot win this way, as you can never make the delay for accepting the captcha result any shorter than what a valid reader will need to enter - and there is literally no delay between the porn proxy and the valid reader in entering results.
Probably the best defense is to be using a unique Captcha, if everyones's Captcha is presented differently it's harder to automate the scraping for your site.
Basically though I don't feel Captchas are the answer in the end, because as a user I find them way to annoying and if I had to enter one to post, I simply would not post after a while.
Possibly a better idea would be to have a loose network of blogs posting hash results from comments, that if a number of posts across different blogs resulted in the same hash would be removed. The spammer could of course vary words and such acorss the message randomly, but perhaps the hash could be built well enough to catch most messages...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Instead of doing silly and useless things like Googlebombing, people should look at solutions Google itself offers to tackle the problem:
Preventing comment spam
Yes, it's up to the blog hosters and not the bloggers themselves to implement that, but it will cost them like 10 minutes of work, at most.
Wrong. That isn't my attitude. My point was that the article summary was vague, incomplete, and poorly written. Rather than explaining any of the "why are they googlebombing", it basically only states that they are googlebombing. Granted, once you understand the background, the foreground makes sense, but as a summary directed at users who may not be into blogs, it was completely ineffective. Why? Slashdot isn't exactly the center of the blogging universe. A good writer, when speaking to an audience outside his field, will take that into account and fill out the summary with an explanation.
Oh, and one other thing, the terms discussed here are nothing like "variegated" -- that word has been in our vocabulary since Latin was common - here's $5, you are obviously smart. It has been my experience though that smart people show off their vocabulary. Brilliant people adjust their vocab to that audience and are able to make complicated matters understandable whether using newspaper level vocab, or Nature level vocab. I'm not saying I'm in that crowd, I'm not, but my work brings me into contact with both types frequently. The former are somewhat useless -- the latter are gold.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good