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."
But you didn't even go to the trouble of linking the term online poker to Wikipedia in your submission? Slashdot has some healthy pagerank, too, ya know.
Yeah, messing with bloggers might not have been the best idea...
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
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.
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'
Wikipedia's slow as a turd as it is. Thanks guys!
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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.
Seems like an awful lot of work to boost that particular result...
I gotta agree with the article... buy more text ads...
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
If the counter-bombers can counter-bomb, then the spammers can counter-counter-bomb, and so on. This sounds like nuclear war, but with keywords.
The only problem is, the automated robots that Google et. al. use are based on rules, and those rules will ALWAYS be able to be reverse-engineered by spammers.
Is there any way out of this?
(And please don't just say, "Google can just hire a bunch of people to look at stuff" because that won't scale to billions of Internet pages).
Ideas anybody?
Willy on Wheels is the ultimate Wikipedia vandal!
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.
If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.
If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.
Very few people use the "I'm feeling lucky" button (I remember reading some really low percentage on the Google website, forget what exactly it was) so even getting this site to #1 won't affect discerning users.
All right, you can make the argument that people are stupid and click blindly. Problably. But most people realize after a few seconds if they've gone to an irrelevant result.
Wouldn't it make more sense to put up a link that would have a possible affect on the spammers' business? I would have gone for a site intended to fight gambling addiction...
Stupid.
yo wtf does some dude sucking his own dick have to do with online poker?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
...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.
That does seem strange. If it was a French Bullfrog site instead, it would be quite understandable.
"I have developed some methods for controling it, but I do not want to divulge them publiclly since the bad guys would then know my counter measures"
Yeah, I know. Those French bulldog guys play hardball. They monitor all the Slashdot posts, too, so you are wise not to reveal your tricks. I know myself, that every time someone mods me down, it has to be one of those bulldog spammers.
"Click on http://www.parismastiff.com for your best Gallic bulldog deals!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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.
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.
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...
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.
a picture of some guy trying to suck his own cock (which is what is on the wikipedia site
What's wrong with Wikipedia having an article on autofellatio?
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.
Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.
Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Who really cares about this? Honestly let them mess with the search results. Dumb people shouldnt be allowed on the internet anyways and im sure after 2 seconds any average joe will figure out the wiki isnt online poker...this is being made into to big an issue.
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
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?
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.
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.
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]
Online poker is a big waste of time. Anyone who partakes in online poker should have their head examined for online poker-itis. Unfortunately there are way to many online poker fanatics out there to keep them away from online poker websites. With some luck however, this onslaught of online poker business will eventually die out just like those online poker charities have.
It's too bad really. Think about online poker for a minute. Does anyone take the time to play online poker seriously? The answer of course is online poker! If you consider that online poker accounts for 99% of online poker spam then you'd instantly come to the conclusion that online poker is not something you want your children doing. If anything, online poker needs to be outlawed throughout the world. If online poker was outlawed, then perhaps we wouldn't get so much online poker spam.
I don't mean to rant about online poker nonstop, but while we are on the subject of online poker, it makes sense to consider one more tidbit of fact. Do you have any idea how many online poker websites there are? I would personally wager that there are more than 10. 10 online poker websites! This in and of itself seems to suggest that online poker has detrimental health effects. If online poker were healthy, I think you would find online poker pamphlets at the doctor's office. Have you ever seen an online poker pamphlet? I didn't think so. Pregnancy, drugs, smoking, and sex, but online poker? Never.
Online poker should be listed as an illegal substance along with online poker spam. Anyone found to be "playing" online poker needs to have their entrails removed and sent to an online poker website owner's home.
Online poker. Bigger than Big Tobacco and deadlier than processed cheese. Online poker is like online communism, except that online poker is a game and not a form of government. Hitler and Stalin both swore by online poker and look where they ended up. They are both DEAD! That's all it takes folks, a little online poker and you're screwed.
A long time ago there was no online poker. It was lightsabers
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
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.
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.
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.
Get a Life!!!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!