11–20 of 98 posts
I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow. For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier deca…
Hopefully fewer spam-links and robot-comments, no?
This is a nice description of the hell of modern WWW. But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd. My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page: ( http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/ ) ( http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/ ) > Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selecti…
Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.spectaclecases.co.uk Address: 83.170.88.134
Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.aglassescase.co.uk Address: 83.170.70.106
Presumably they have two different webservers, perhaps connected to the same ordering system/db server. I guess they could be using a virtualisation service and found this easier to set up.
The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.
We think the link removal requests are dodgy.
Suspicion is that by and large the requests do not come from the companies actually associated with the linked site. And that when challenged those senders of the request have then squirmed, apologised and claimed the request was sent by accident.
Example: http://pastebin.com/P9tsWL0x
Basically: I believe that a fair number of these requests are from SEO companies attempting to get competitor sites a lower pagerank so that their properties fare better.
Only a minority of requests seem to come from the companies linked, and in part I wonder whether other SEOs are cargo-culting the phenomena by copying it without understanding it.
I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail.
I've not removed a single link as a result of these bizarre notices.
Another problem that seems to be on the rise is corporate shills. In the past these were easy enough to spot, they were people who would go to blogs/forums and spam them with blatant attempts at promotion.
Now they seem to be getting much better, they will come to a site like HN and read the comments that people are posting and will write their own comments in a similar style, not embed links and fly under the radar as legitimate users.
There are marketplaces for selling aged accounts for these purposes. This makes me very skeptical of any type of product recommendation from a website user.
When I started getting emails from companies asking for the spam-links from my sites to be removed I assumed it was a good sign. If they're cleaning up their spam-links then presumably Google have found a way to make those spam-links not pay. Hopefully fewer spam-links and robot-comments, no?
[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
When I started getting emails from companies asking for the spam-links from my sites to be removed I assumed it was a good sign. If they're cleaning up their spam-links then presumably Google have found a way to make those spam-links not pay. Hopefully fewer spam-links and robot-comments, no?
Good article, but the author takes a somewhat generous view of academic citations. There are spammers in academia -- e.g. editors and reviewers who block rivals from publishing or who demand citations of their own work in revisions.
For an unintentionally humorous counterexample consider Tai's paper, which has around 100 quotations. ;-) http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract