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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'
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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