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A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

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Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#21

Post by krapp »

coderdude wrote: post #15
markdown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another solution is to hide all links when a page is viewed by a user who isn't logged in. No, this is almost as bad as what medium.com does with all its links (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes). A web link should be respected.

> (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes) I like this idea a lot. It has more than one use. Tracking is one but eliminating the "PR bleed" is another and it should deter spammers who are looking for link weight. I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new use…

I've considered rewriting user links to scramble the text and point them inward at a link proxy (which then routes out through an anonymizing service like anonym.to). Anything to destroy their value.

Haven't actually put it to practice yet though and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately it seems that if spammers catch just a whiff of SEO from you, they'll never stop, like cockroaches.

[edit] I also haven't tried putting it into practice because I can imagine how utterly annoying it would be. I can't stand those "you are now leaving [site x]" pages myself.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#22

Post by JoshTriplett »

greggman wrote: post #18
kkowalczyk wrote: post #9

Blaming google for seo spam is not productive - spammers are legion and in constant battle to game google's ranking system, whatever it currently is. This won't change as long as google is used to search for things. There is a solution to his particular problem: better forum software. I don't want to trivialize the problem of writing spam-resistant forum software but it's not such an insurmontable problem (this forum…

I'd attribute it to your custom software. Break phpBB and you can infect thousands of sites. Break your custom software you get to infect 1 site. I ran a forum using SimpleMachines. Turned on all the spam fighting stuff. Didn't matter. Bots or Mechanical Turks made 10-30 new accounts a day. I tried moderating the accounts but who wants to spend time every day to delete the fefRFGR34@foobar.com account. I gave up and…

If you see Mechanical Turk used for spam like that, you could report it to Amazon as abuse and get the account(s) paying for it shut down.

I also wonder if Amazon has a content filter, to block URL patterns in Turk tasks.

As for bots, IP banning goes a long way.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#23

Post by skore »

markdown wrote: post #19
coderdude wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes) I like this idea a lot. It has more than one use. Tracking is one but eliminating the "PR bleed" is another and it should deter spammers who are looking for link weight. I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new use…

> I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. It damn well should be. The link is the basis of the www. > If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new users aren't spamming. Of course, but breaking legitimate links as a form of spam control is just lazy. We're going OT here, but... > eliminating the "PR bleed" There is no such thing. PR…

> It damn well should be. The link is the basis of the www.

I think it is just as much the basis of the www to show a link as it is to not show it.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#24

Post by jonknee »

markdown wrote: post #19
coderdude wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes) I like this idea a lot. It has more than one use. Tracking is one but eliminating the "PR bleed" is another and it should deter spammers who are looking for link weight. I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new use…

> I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. It damn well should be. The link is the basis of the www. > If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new users aren't spamming. Of course, but breaking legitimate links as a form of spam control is just lazy. We're going OT here, but... > eliminating the "PR bleed" There is no such thing. PR…

> It damn well should be. The link is the basis of the www.

Anything on the www is only sacred if it's on your server. If you're on someone else's server it's up to them to extend the privilege of making links (or any content). Having links moderated for new users seems pretty fair--the vast majority of brand new users who make a post that contains links are spammers. The worst case is it will take a little time for a mod to clean up. You can even have your link be removed publicly but still function for members (so no Google juice but people can still answer your question).

If you have ever moderated a forum you will know how bad spammers can be. It's not just posts either, PM spam is really popular and a lot harder to police.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#25

Post by coderdude »

krapp wrote: post #21
coderdude wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes) I like this idea a lot. It has more than one use. Tracking is one but eliminating the "PR bleed" is another and it should deter spammers who are looking for link weight. I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new use…

I've considered rewriting user links to scramble the text and point them inward at a link proxy (which then routes out through an anonymizing service like anonym.to). Anything to destroy their value. Haven't actually put it to practice yet though and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately it seems that if spammers catch just a whiff of SEO from you, they'll never stop, like cockroaches. [edit…

I'm not a fan of those either. If you want to avoid having a "now leaving" page while still deterring spammers then you could create your own URL shortener with a separate domain. The link text could be the original link but the URL is the one generated by your shortener. You could even restore the original text with a replace() if you ever felt the need.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#26

Post by kalleboo »

jedireza wrote: post #5

You could shoot the hostage and add rel='nofollow' to all outbound links. You should be able to programmatically do this. Then with an auto-reply (or 'link policy' page) inform 3rd party sites that the link-juice (good or bad) is no longer flowing.

We did this, it made no difference.

What finally worked was a combo of: custom javascript on the signup form, disallowing new users from posting links in posts or signatures (and auto-banning ones who continually made attempts), insta-banning users who filled out non-linkedin links in the "linked-in link" profile field. We still get spam, but now it's maybe one post a week, instead of 10-20 a day, so it's at a level that moderators/user reports can handle it.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#27

Post by tronalddump »

jedireza wrote: post #5

You could shoot the hostage and add rel='nofollow' to all outbound links. You should be able to programmatically do this. Then with an auto-reply (or 'link policy' page) inform 3rd party sites that the link-juice (good or bad) is no longer flowing.

Rel=no follow discourages spam due to PR flow, but won't stop it. It still has an influence, however diminished.

Take an hour or two and write a script that selects all users with less than 100 posts and iterates through their posts removing links. The integrity of actual users is maintained while 99% of spam links eliminated. You spend a total of 2 hours, but don't have to deal with the emails any more - which could save many more hours.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#28

Post by a5seo »

coderdude wrote: post #11

One way to combat this problem is to deny new users the ability to post links by replacing the link text with [removed]. HN has a karma system with thresholds that must be passed in order to get additional privileges (like down-voting). If you have a site that assigns karma to users (even if it's a secret number) then you can set a threshold for allowing links to pass through. It's not perfect but it's better than le…

nofollow all external links

point external links through a redirect like /out?to= and put /out in you robots.txt

change your url structure and simply 404 the pages with spammy links

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#29

Post by [deleted] »

krapp wrote: post #21
coderdude wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (rewriting them to point inwards towards redirects for tracking purposes) I like this idea a lot. It has more than one use. Tracking is one but eliminating the "PR bleed" is another and it should deter spammers who are looking for link weight. I understand the sentiment you're conveying but a link isn't sacred. If you allow users to post content to your site then you should be taking measures to ensure that new use…

I've considered rewriting user links to scramble the text and point them inward at a link proxy (which then routes out through an anonymizing service like anonym.to). Anything to destroy their value. Haven't actually put it to practice yet though and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a good idea. Unfortunately it seems that if spammers catch just a whiff of SEO from you, they'll never stop, like cockroaches. [edit…

[deleted]

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#30

Post by Nikolas0 »

I had the same problem myself. In fact I still run a couple of forums. And I get at least 3 "remove my links" mails per day. I guess you can't ask them money, but they already cost you money (to maintain their spam and since the panda update read their emails asking you to remove it) so I guess the best solution is just ignore those mails.

Regarding anti spam I am afraid there is nothing you can do. Real humans will create an account for 0.01$ and they will post anything (I tried adding custom code in the post code as well, but those signups are not necessarily bots) In fact they even post if you don't allow them to post links (they post the urls with no http)

Next solution I'll try is social integration. Maybe that would work for some time but even this way spammers will find their way to create thousands of crap accounts in FB, twitter, etc.

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