At the Speed of Link Farm Spam
posted 25 Nov ’07, 7.56am MST PST on flickr
It took less than 5 hours after a recent blog post for this first link farm spam trackback to arrive.
As bad as that is, the give credit to someone else or am I really known as "Kick-Fiend"?
Hello Google! Your Page Rank incentive is killing us bloggers! Do Something!
And the problem is Google. Sure, “Do No Evil” is a snappy tag line, but in terms of providing the incentive for link spammers that clog us bloggers along every reach of the long tail- Google sits idly by, collecting Adsense $ and does nothing.
With all that incredible brain power that can develop cool apps and services, is it possible they cannot throw a few engineers at the problem and put some better logic into search that would punish link spammers?
So perhaps that does not qualify as “evil” but it is not “good”.
I am ready for some public action, are you? As a bloger, do you enjoy filtering out spam from your blog? Does it consume any of your time dealing with unwanted, unconnected comments/trackback spam that hit your blog?
Google- We have a Problem.
I’ve recently been having the exact same problem. What I want to know is how to deal with it! I’ve got Spam Karma 2 turned to Supastrong on trackback spam and still get it like crazy.
How are you handling this because I am ready to turn off trackbacks entirely!
Chris
I’m just really tired of it in general – in my email, in my blog, everywhere I look.
And – it’s just so tacky. So putrid. So vile. People ask me why I am so ant-capitalism (etc) and I point to spam, and I say *this* is what they think is appropriate.
We need to design against spam. Google won’t help us. And even if Google did, some other company would come along to monetize it.
I’m getting tons of the same stuff, and sometimes it’s only minutes after I post. It’s driving me nuts. I’m with you, something needs to be done … spam harvesters don’t cut it.
In the last couple of weeks google has altered its page rank algorithm to deal with link spammers. A lot of people’s pagerank dropped dramticaly as a result. I guess Google are trusting to natural selection to weed the garden…
I just encountered this site…
http://whydiggisblocked.com/
From Digg, naturally
http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_Digg_is_Blocked
and it occurs to me that we have, collectively, the answer in our own hands: block Google.
Oh I know, nobody wants to do that, it’s the kiss of internet death – but it might be worth doing it for one day, just to make a point.
Thoughts?
Stephen said, “…it’s just so tacky. So putrid. So vile. People ask me why I am so ant-capitalism (etc) and I point to spam, and I say *this* is what they think is appropriate.”
I share this ill feeling when I watch commercials on television, and actually hate those more than I hate spam, because while spam may be more virulent in some of its strains, for the most part it’s quiet and easy to ignore. My position on it, however, is that consumers are going to grow so sick of it that they develop “banner blindness” to it in any and all forms, and thus it will ultimately be deemed a waste of time and money by the corporate sponsors. The nice thing about the connected world we are building is it allows for individuals to instantly search for, save, personalize, and control their own access to products and services, making in-your-face and often misleading advertising a thing of the past. I may be the idealistic capitalist in saying so, but I truly believe that sort of populism will whittle away at the annoyance