News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Nov 26, 2008 - 01:46 pm
Story Found By: AlhanKeser 1275 Days ago
Category: SEM
33 Comments
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News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Nov 26, 2008 - 01:46 pm
Story Found By: AlhanKeser 1275 Days ago
Category: SEM
33 Comments
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Comments
Poetry.
This was the best article I’ve read in a long time. Thank you Danny.
I’m suprised you’ve restrained youself this long considering the torrnet of spam that comes through Sphinn...but, I’m glad you’ve finally gone on the record about this issue.
Pretty much sums it up. Nice work.
good post. One of my pet peeves is misspellings, including in spam. Since when does the plural of "business" have an apostrophe? "Business’s" sheesh...
Yeah it’s frustrating to a submitter that wants to get their submission exposure. A story gets good exposure is through the "what’s new" section but when page 1 on that fills up w/spam, and pushes your story to page 2, you no longer have the eyes or sphinns on that submission anymore.
But you know, Danny, that your post will make the same amount of difference that all the other discussions have done over the years. Zero. Sorry, but you know it’s true. Hope it felt good to get it off your chest though.
Applaud until my hands are raw! Brilliant post.There should be a line in the sand, despite the people who continue with the ’all’s fair’ argument. This is a perfectly good line to draw and for the industry to get behind. Whether it will make a difference isn’t really the point. People thought that marching against apartheid wasn’t going to make a difference but they did and it did. If the voices are loud enough, an entire community (such as Sphinn) can be galvanised into action - even if it is only to quickly stamp out spam in our own circles, such as here.
So I’m in the Dallas airport and I get on a plane in ~5 minutes. Then I’ll be internetless for a few days. But I’ve got this story loaded up to read on the plane, so I’m looking forward to reading it. The fact is that if a technique or loophole lets you make money, spammers will try to abuse that loophole. Scripted programs, hacking and the global nature of the web can make the issue worse. I think of my job at Google as trying to reduce the ways that spammers can attack search engines. But there will always be people who are willing to exploit loopholes if they think there’s the potential for money. :(
P.S. Reminds me of the post about Ask that Danny did a while ago. Note to self: don’t get Danny angry. :)
...and to the central theme that "Google pays the very people it fughts to arm themselve’s for the fight against the people who pay them" I say... My flippin’ head hurts!
Good rant about those mo fo’s, to bad it is just pounding sand with them. They will never stop and seeing an article like this might be even motivational...
Stopping to have our time wasted is as hard as convincing companies to start a blog back in 2001.<div></div><div>Now, in no small matter thanks to the search engine’s increased smarts, we’re winning the "get content" conversation.</div><div></div><div>But I seriously don’t know when or really IF we’ll win the "get good content" conversation across the board.</div><div></div><div>Adding value *or at the very least not being without value* is an investment of time, effort, creativity and dollars companies need and people want. Meanwhile burping out hot smelly air is as effective as email spam: it’s cheap, can be outsourced, hides within the dense woods of a million pages published, and with even 1% of its generated links counting gives enough *if not more dollar value* than doing the value added thing.</div>
@Danny - I should have clarified in the previous discussion - you did convince me that there are some occasions where linkspamming a dead site sucks. If you can linkspam a site without harming anyone though - be it hurting their feelings, wasting time directly (comment moderation) or indirectly (garbage serps) etc. - in short if the only entity that will see/be affected by the linkspam is a piece of software, then I maintain it can (at least theoretically) be done ethically. As to the mediocre content that supports much of the paid links world, I agree that that stuff needs to go. And the best way, imho, is for the rest of us who appreciate quality content to link out to it more generously.
i think that one of the reasons spammers are submitting here, even though the links are nofollowed and the spam is (relatively) quickly deleted, is the fact that Googlebots pound this site like crazy and index anything that appears here for longer than a few minutes. I’ve had posts indexed in under a minute after submitting here so if you need quick indexing, sphinn/digg/whatever is the best way to go.this can probably be solved by blocking pages like New Posts or latest comments or even the submission page itself (for a few days at least) from being indexed by Googlebot and thus prevent Google from indexing it.
I just looked up ’rant’ in an online directory and the link took me to this page ;-)As another [shall we say] non-millennial!-- that’s been around this e-marketing malarkey since ’96 I agree with all your sentiments.When I realise I have subjected my students to one of my rants, I find sitting in a quiet place with a bottle of beer normally does the trick
Even though i am not a fan of spam when it happens to me, i can kind of live with it as its just part of the Internet experience, it’s not like it totally takes over your life and there are some good spam blockers out there like Akismet for wordpress.I know that pligg in itself if very suseptable to spam, and wrote a blog post about it at http://www.chewie.co.uk/blackhat/pligg-auto-submitter-released/ however Sphinn plugs most of these holes so i wonder if spammers are signing up manually then using a system like pligg to hit sphinn repeatedly after they have registered?Finally, i think since i’m the little guy and Danny S is the (Gran?) Daddy of SEO, he should of linked directly to Gabs post on my blog aswell as this topic, teehee :o)
Hi Danny,Rather than rewrite from scratch, I think your efforts would be better to put into making contributions to the Pligg project - it’s open source and most OSS projects will welcome contributions with open arms. Contributing can be getting one of your employees to join and contribute to the project, or an alternative is specifying some behaviour you want and offering to pay the existing developers to implement it. This has the added advantage of helping other people out with this problem, and will help reduce spam on other sites too.Just a note - this particular attack you’re describing (with the multiple new account signups) sounds like an automated spam attack to me rather than done by humans (though you never know).One of many possible parts of the solution could be site blocking - if someone spams your forum too many times with links to a particular domain (and the articles are off-topic spam, so obviously tied to the commenting, to stop ’Sphinn-bowling’), block all submissions and comments with the URL in it. Here you’ll want to make sure you put in a written and obvious warning when submitting as to the reason it was blocked (so people can’t comment about how awful the spam about spamsite.com was before and get accidentally blocked, and so people can also file for reconsideration as mistakies are inevitable in any system).Another vaguely related comment with regards to the nofollow situation - have you considered allowing your super-admins to be able to flag articles as dofollow even if they don’t get enough Spinns? This could be 3 people to 30 people, depending on who you trust. Things don’t necessarily have to be popular to be interesting or useful (currently it’s somewhat skewed in favour of sites with big readerships like Search Engine Journal).Final suggestion - a ’duplicate stories detector’ like Digg has would be an extremely useful addition to Sphinn.Good luck with the spam fighting!Ian
@mike err diferent bits of a company have diferent agendas whok new :-) Googles a baby when i wiorked in BT all the engineering centers (who where all part of one divison that was larger than google was today) competed in a freidly way against each other as well as the other bits of the company.@danny maybe you need to have a SEO hall of shame for comapanies that spam SEL i bet you culd get apage to rank above them for thier name. Pligg though is a bag of Sh78$^e it needs replacing
There’s no incentive "not" to spam, so i really don’t blame them. When you work your fingers to the bone for 12 hours a day following Google’s guidelines like the holy bible building a content rich site/business and Google tosses it in the trash and ranks spam for your own brand name you have to ask yourself does Google even know what they are doing?To me it’s like they have lost control, but i do know this is going to be the darkest Xmas my kids have ever had.That’s what i get for doing what’s right, meanwhile the spammers are eating lobster and Google happily ranks the spam.
What a great article. I would have Sphunn it ten times if I could.Spam on Sphinn is an issue I have raised a few times since I have been an active user, it’s good to hear that methods are in place to resolve the issues, whether that is a completely new site or enhancing the Pligg software.I do sometimes wonder what the hell is the point in half the manual spam submissions I see, it honestly baffles me in some cases as to where the revenue comes from this.As UtahSEOpro mentioned above, I am looking forward to the times I can submit decent articles again to the ’What’s New’ page and get some visibility in the hope others find it valueable. I have stopped submitting articles in the morning now here in the UK because by the time the US awakes, there is at least one page of spam and my submissions have been pushed either to the bottom of the list or to the second or third page and no-one is seeing them.Well said Danny!
In terms of the advice on how we might better protect Sphinn from spam, I appreciate it, but that’s beside the point. That we get spammed doens’t surprise me. That automated programs might be getting through more wouldn’t surprise me. Filters, blocks, we have plenty of these and more will come. Sidenote, one reason we’re rebuilding is simply because we didn’t feel Pligg could do some of the new features we wanted.But the point isn’t that I want to reduce spam on Sphinn. It’s that I’d like to see the internet marketing community, a majority of it, loudly and clearly saying "this we do not do. this you should not do." That automated and off-topic link spam isn’t something people are going to do nor wink-wink nudge-nudge about. That generating content with no inherent value other than to maybe get a search ranking or help drive rankings of another page is garbage that people won’t do.I don’t hold out much hope this will happen, of course.
It’s that I’d like to see the internet marketing community, a majority of it, loudly and clearly saying "this we do not do. this you should not do." That automated and off-topic link spam isn’t something people are going to do nor wink-wink nudge-nudge about. That generating content with no inherent value other than to maybe get a search ranking or help drive rankings of another page is garbage that people won’t do.<div></div><div></div><div>Well speaking as someone who’s been saying that for many, many years and not really seeing it have much affect, I think we’re just too tired and annoyed to really care anymore. </div><div></div><div></div><div>It would have helped back in the old days if others were beating the same drum. I’m afraid now it may be too late as those of us who once cared have mostly given up hope that things will get better. </div><div></div><div></div><div>Matt Cutts has it right that when there’s money to be made by exploiting stuff, stuff will be exploited.</div>
Quoting Jill: "Matt Cutts has it right that when there’s money to be made by exploiting stuff, stuff will be exploited."Unfortunately most of the money is coming from the very same Google that Matt Cutts works for, so unless Matt gets serious about addressing this issue within the company he represents, this battle is a lost one. I for one hope Google does do more in their own house to fix this problem.
[quote]. Hey, if I move out of my house, it’s not ethical to come along and spray paint graffiti on the side of it, not in my book.[/quote] Yeah, well it’s actually quite fine if you left a sign on the side of the house that said ’please post your comments’ before you moved out. You know, like forums and blogs and sphinn do/does. They take user input. Oh, you don’t like SOME of the content? Then moderate it. Or bitch about it. I guess it’s clear which of those two choices is going on here. It’s easy for us to talk ethics as we sit in a westernized country making six or seven figures working on our dual monitor setups and having tea and crumpets with the Google spam team. But if I’m sitting in a third world country and all I have to do is fire up a program to post to websites that accept these postings - and doing so is not illegal OR unethical where I come from - and if doing so puts food on the table for my kids, then guess what? I’m going to feed your forum or blog enough spam to choke a horse. Seriously, bitching about shades of user input while you’re making a living from it is kind of ironic IMO.
Very well written article..Quoting from the article itself:"That’s why Sphinn is heavily modified to the degree that it’s damn hard even for those not trying to spam to register (CAPTCHAs, email verification). Then there are limits on how much you can submit at first, plus we have a staff of human moderators."Well CAPTCHA in registration page is Gr8, but on the Story Submit page there is simply no CAPTCHA or any sort of other verification that can help the computer to catch an automated submission. So it is possible that bots has been armed with manually registered accounts and they are automatically spamming sphinn.I myself always use the "Report as Spam" & Desphinn whenever I come across any spam @ Sphinn. But it seems like it doesn’t really have any effect until a moderator checks the story. (Or probably not enough people cares to report a story as spam).I think we have come to a situation where we just need to work on this issue together rather than hoping that the ’computer program’ will be successful to eliminate spam. If enough people comes forward and use the ’report as spam’ button - it is supposed to auto delete the story or hide the story from public view and notify the moderator to approve its deletion.
I’d guess that 90+% of all the URLs that Google ever discovers, simply lead to shite created in the name of SEO by some bullshit marketer conning some merchant out of their cash for bullshit services. Thankfully their spam filters make ~99% of it vanish from sight. The other 1% is still very annoying though.
My last topic on Sphinn spam caused quite a discussion... http://sphinn.com/story/84263I agree with saadkamal though, we do all need to work on this together, I have seen other websites/forums completely destroyed from spam and they never recovered from it... In a community that we all use and benefit from, with everyone working together, it wouldn’t take too much to keep it in ship shape.I am using the report as spam button on a daily basis now... Sometimes takes up to 5/6 hours for the submissions to vanish though but as mentioned in my topic (link above), I think this is partly due to the time zones we are all in.Enforce a zero tolerance policy... :p
Can someone start by trying to educate all the thick-as-shit idiot link droppers from India/Asia that are almost destroying the bits of the web where I normally hang out?The problem is, there are tons of blogs and SEO sites over here in The West that are telling everyone: "get links. Get Links. GET LINKS. **GET** **LINKS**, and so they are by spamming the crap out of everything that has a box that text can be typed into...The problem is there is way over 3 billion of them (only a small % online, but growing by tens of thousands per week), and less than a billion of Us.
Ironically, Syndk8 which makes the autopligg spam tool sent me this today as part of regular mailings they issue:"Autopligg has been pimped to run at lightning speed and getting backlinks has never been so easy or fast.I now have a team of excellent developers behind me in syndk8 so we are trying to push the boundary and make the best `automatic promotion` tools on the market.Most of our tools will be for link building because that’s where most Seo`s have difficulty.We may occasionally throw out a content generator or two but they wont be just average so we have to keep working on the text and sentence structure to make them the best ever....Autopligg submits to hundreds of thousand of Pligg sites.For those who didn’t want to use serverside Autopligg we have now ported it to desktop so you can run it from your computer.Autopligg desktop is pretty much a point and click application.Autopligg desktop is multi threaded and runs many times faster than the serverside Autopligg.With the desktop version we have the same capture breaking, proxy support and the same obsessive support for users.I would say people are pretty happy and still nobody (apart from pligg owners) have said anything bad about the tool.White hat, black hat, any hat! this tool is rocking the industry."
Thanks for taking a turn at pushing that hopeless rock, Sisyphus-- I mean Danny. [:-)]Oh, and: "...nobody (apart from pligg owners) have said anything bad about the tool." Nobody aside from anyone who cares about keeping content high-quality. (And that’s "nobody has", not "nobody have". Syndk8 needs an editor as well as an ethicist.)
I made my blog dofollow, but my forum has gotten hit a lot with nasty posts. A million linx!
I agree with the sentiment of Danny’s post; still, you can’t escape the fact that people will do whatever they can get away with. Lawmakers pass laws and put officers on the streets to enforce those laws because human beings do not instinctively choose to do the right thing. All animals are inherently selfish. Cops looting Wal-mart and maniacs shooting at rescue boats during Katrina proved that.<div></div><div></div><div>When Sphinn moves away from pligg and evolves out of the uninspired "Digg for SEOS" vision into a more forward-looking site ala Google (where a large chunk of spam is dealt with algorithmically), spam should stop being such a major issue.</div><div></div><div></div><div>You obviously can’t talk spammers away from spamming. Like Matt said, if they can do it and profit they will. The answer is simple: Make it extremely difficult for spammers to spam Sphinn - which, I suspect, is the kind of thing Matt Cutts has been doing at Google for the past several years. Like Danny in this post, he’s also asked for webmaster cooperation, which was by and large ridiculed by the SEO community. While SEOs may be more sympathetic to Danny Sullivan and Sphinn (since the site’s in their back yard), we end up with the same bottom line - Spam has to be dealt with algorithmically. Sphinn members using the "Snitch" button, mods doing 90% of the house-cleaning, or Danny doing detective work and emailing people to talk them out of spamming Sphinn are all temporary fixes that drain everyone’s energy and time.</div>