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Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Mar 31, 2005 02:40 PM
from the there-be-scammers-everywhere dept.
from the there-be-scammers-everywhere dept.
The Real Nick W writes "Wordpress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for "duplicate content" such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the Wordpress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban Wordpress outright as they tend to do when SEO's and web dev's pull these kinds of stunts."
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Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming
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Er... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://ziz.org/~ziz/)
One word... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.wundergro...ory.asp?ID=KTXPFLUG3)
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.hitesman.com/jason/)
Re:Er... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 27 2005, @10:43AM)
Of course the cause was the heavily laced vermiculite (I remember hopping in big bins full of the stuff when I was a kid. It was a really neat spongy stuff that looked really interesting [google.ca]) that Grace was processing at the St. Thomas plant, and they knew for many years that it was packed full of asbestos but decided that lawsuits due to death and injuries were less costly than cutting off the asbestos lined mine.
Anyways, a lot of executives at Grace should have gone to jail for gross negligence causing death, but of course they didn't. As it stands we never did sue Grace, as that sort of case is much less common here in Canada, but I'm sure my father wasn't the only victim.
Re:Er... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.tomkoinc.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 09 2007, @05:10PM)
The reason the two became associated was, as mentioned in parent, one particular vermiculite mine had asbestos in it as well. All the vermiculite mines which tested positive for asbestos are now closed down.
I used vermiculite and cement for the bottom of my inground swimming pool (under the liner of course). The result is a bottom that is easier on the feet than a traditional concrete bottom. While vermiculite and cement is not as strong as gravel and cement, it is still able to support a 30 foot water column, which is far deeper than my pool.
Vermiculite is also commonly used as insulation, especially in masonry applications.
Re:Er... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.automobilez.net/)
An ebay search for "asbestos" sometimes yields some surprising results.
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html | Last Journal: Tuesday March 15 2005, @01:16PM)
Re:Er... (Score:4, Insightful)
People dont search for a word like"mesothelioma" just for fun, so its very likely to get "useful" hits.
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
There are rummours these are one of the highest paying keywords around.
Some people will make anything to have these ads on their pages - even use hidden text to try and catch the Google bot attention. This is the "spamming" in the article.
Oh, crap!!! (Score:5, Funny)
The day will come when... (Score:5, Funny)
Blogger.com (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://google.com/)
Re:Blogger.com (Score:5, Informative)
Spammers are paying the wordpress site to host bogus articles on the site. Since the blogs of people that use the wordpress software package link to the wordpress site, the wordpress site is ranked as an authoritative site. This lets the spammers get their rankings on Google boosted because wordpress links to them in the bogus spam articles.
It has NOTHING to do with what people are blogging about.
Re:Blogger.com (Score:5, Informative)
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Something fun to do (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday October 22, @04:01PM)
Re:Something fun to do (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.packetoverload.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 15 2004, @08:19AM)
Yep, a link back to this /. story.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
(http://outintheblack.blogspot.com/)
But, given the quality of the postings here, you can be a smoker or a late night toker.
Lots of problems like that... (Score:5, Interesting)
SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.mckaysalisbury.com/)
Re:SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.geekinformed.com/)
If Google gives higher rankings to sites that have more links pointed at them, would you consider link exchange programs sneaky? For instance, lots of websites link to slashdot.org, but I doubt that CowboyNeil has a SEO company getting reciprocal links for
Are link exchanges just another example of exploiting a flaw in google?
Lying to People by Lying to Robots by SEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 02 2005, @11:08PM)
- Tell you to write content that's actually interesting to humans. (Editors do this professionally, and pagerank originally attempted to do this by guessing that if people go to the effort to put links on their web pages then the targets are probably interesting to those people.)
- Make sure that your interesting content is presented in a way that robots can find it. (An FAQ that tells you to put your keywords in titles and META tags can do this, or an HTML editor tool can do it automagically, but some people do need to pay someone else to RTFM for them, and theoretically an SEO can make money doing it.)
- Lie to the robots so they guess that your customers' actually-uninteresting content is probably interesting, so the robots show the humans the boring SEO-assisted pages first instead of the actually interesting pages. This lying is the main business that effective SEOs really engage in. (Ineffective SEOs are in the business of lying to their customers about being effective SEOs, but they and their customers deserve each other and sort of by definition don't have a high enough pagerank to worry about.)
- "Sneaky attacks" are SEO lies.
- "A very closely monitored network of domains" is SEO lying too.
- Hijacking blog comment services is really annoying SEO lying.
- Robogenerating lots of pages with lots of popular search keywords, especially if you're building them into URL names, is SEO lying.
- Robogenerating them without actually storing them anywhere might be technically interesting SEO lying, though disk space is so cheap these days that it might not be necessary.
- Hijacking real pages using 302-Redirect attacks is technically interesting for about 15 minutes, but is really nasty spammer lying.
Googlebombing by using sneaky techniques to promote your "403 Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure"->"whitehouse.gov" pages was technically similar to SEO lying - but it was clever and amusing metacontent, and deserved its 15 minutes of fame, and watching the sleazy Republicans reply in kind was amusing too, but it's Been Done Now.Google (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.frontrowcrew.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 16 2004, @09:55AM)
Problem: Spammers are very obviously trying to muck with our results.
Solution: Block said spammers.
The only problem is that it's hard to notice all but the most egregious offenders.
I've love Google to add a link to the standard search results. Something like "Report Spam." If enough (100k, a million, whatever) unique people/IPs reported a site or result, it would be flagged for human review.
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
the problem with that solution (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.carnageblender.com/)
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://chrisbenard.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 28 2004, @11:01AM)
That has to be the most insightful thing I have EVER read in a slashdot comment. You should suggest it via the google suggest page. It sounds like a great idea to use the most awesome pattern matching machine(the human mind). I'm sure there are more than enough people like you and I that can tell just from the description it's a google-attacking spam page that would flag it.
In short, mod parent up.
Google Spam Report (Score:5, Informative)
(http://francis.uy.googlepages.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 29, @09:40AM)
They used to link to it at the bottom of some (random?) search result pages, but I haven't seen it posted publically in a while. Perhaps it didn't actually work as well as you or they hope it would.
Ban their ass (Score:3, Insightful)
Shall we let some spammers go wild just because they might be using sendmail?
I say ban their ass.
Re:They were begging for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google hasn't signed a contract with WordPress, either. It's their right to lay out ground rules and ban anyone who doesn't follow them.
Newsflash: Google can do what they want.
Re:They were begging for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.cellfish.com/)
After all, if every google search just led to a bunch of spam pages, Google itself would cease to be very useful.
Re:They were begging for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.geoffreyspear.com/)
Google doesn't owe them anything. They're indexing them for free, and they can stop indexing them whenever they want if they don't meet Google's criteria for indexing.
Re:Fork the bastards (Score:4, Informative)
(http://virtuelvis.com/ | Last Journal: Monday December 13 2004, @03:20PM)
Wordpress collaborating with spammers ? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.jnuwebsites.com/)
And i get a loads of comment spam that use keywords similar to the spam words that the wordpress website was hosting.
I wonder if the wordpress website maintainer has aided the creation of spam bots to identify worpress users and post on thier sites using weaknesses of the default install.
Next ban eBay! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.n1ywb.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 28 2004, @03:12PM)
Re:Next ban eBay! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.insurancegenius.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 22 2005, @07:26PM)
It seems that's what they do - whatever you search for, they put "for sale" on the tail end of it and hope you click on it.
Re:Next ban eBay! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~dalroth/ | Last Journal: Sunday January 04 2004, @05:12PM)
Every time you do a search on google, add the following:
-amazon -google -search -ebay
You'd be amazed at how much cleaner the search becomes!
Bryan
If You Don't Want To Support WordPress After This (Score:5, Informative)
(http://injoke.org/)
It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.
Re:If You Don't Want To Support WordPress After Th (Score:4, Informative)
none (Score:3, Interesting)
Geez - what a kneejerk (Score:4, Interesting)
Go here: http://planet.wordpress.org/ [wordpress.org]
Read. Maybe read it again if yer slow. Sounds like the guy was simply trying to raise a few bucks to support what is IMO one of the best blogging apps out there.
Re:Geez - what a kneejerk (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.geoffreyspear.com/)
So spamming for "good" is OK? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dictate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google can't dictate content except on its own sites (google, froogle, etc), and they certainly are not doing it here. However they are perfectly free to leave junk sites out of their index. Google exercising freedom over its own index is not censorship nor is it dictating the content of other's sites.
Spam is spam is spam. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
I said then, and I say now, hogwash.
Any advertising by flooding a common communication channel can meaningfully be described as spam, whether it's Usenet, email, IM, Text messages, or search engine spamming. There's no point to trying to draw a magic circle around part of the problem and pointing outside and saying "that's not really spam".