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.
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.
Well, I suppose the button "I'm feeling lucky!" makes a lot more sense in the context of online poker.
In all seriousness, some people I know have started using google IFL links on blogs rather tahn direct links. The idea is that in five years if the Captain Crunch brand changes, an I'm Feeling Lucky search for Captain Crunch will probably take you to the new 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.
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?
As a bloger, let me give you an example.
My blog is probably the least trafficed site on the internet. Google doesn't even index the blog's sub pages as they're php and not directory roots. I basicly do news commentary. That's it.
I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers. They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.
I write this as a hobby. I pay for it out of pocket, it makes no revenue and, as I don't sell ad space or use ad words, I never expect it to.
If I'm not going to use the resources I paied for to advertise why should someone else get to? This kind of behavior is inconsiderate, it's invasive, and it's really fucking annoying.
So yea.... I'm tired of being used as free advertising for something I'll never see a dime from.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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.