March 21, 2008

New kind of website spam

I just made a blog post - Buying and selling websites.

Within minutes, I got a trackback. I was a bit puzzled at the lightening speed. I thought - how can someone read my entire article and blogged about it in less than a minute! I followed the link and found a new kind of spam, which is spreading rapidly on Internet, making life difficult for Internet users, Google and Adwords advertisers.

Here is the site which automatically picked up the post (courtsey - aggregators), modified the author to some ‘Wesley Warren’ and snapped up few lines from the post to link it to my blog for further reading. A smart blackhat SEO tactic for sure. This is a new technique to create keyword dense pages to attract better rankings and make "free money" by inserting Adwords everywhere as the only exit route from the page. These spam sites are bound to get high click-through rates because we all are lazy to type in a seperate web address in the browser address bar.

Google has to get rid of this new spam to throw up quality results, as these spam sites does not provide any valuable (or unique) content, but still escape the duplicate content filter of Google. I think it should not be very complicated for the Google experts since this time the duplicate content is in "organized data" i.e. blogs instead of "unorganized data".

I hope this nuisance is sorted out ASAP!

 

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September 23, 2007

Google fooled by transparent links & hit counter spam

I recently came across a post by Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal about Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam.

It is shocking to see that Google has not been able to tackle such crude level of spam. We hear about site ageing, search engine saturation, quality one way link and latent semantic indexing as key factors that Google is using to improve search results. However what Loren has investigated in this case is absolutely shocking.

It shows how a million dollar keyword (i.e. payday loans made it to #1 in Google by using under-the-belt techniques like transparent links bundled in hit-counters offered by "free hit-counter website" in less than one year of existence and less than a dozen indexed pages with not-so-good quality content. It is really confusing.

We all presume that Google is very smart and to do well on this search engine, we have to be very smart. I just hope we do not need to be spam-smart :)

Read the complete research here - Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam

Abhishek

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December 2, 2006

When Gmail makes life difficult

I am a big fan of Gmail because of its speed and simplicity. However Gmail makes life hell lot of difficult in some cases -

1. The Threading Bug
While threading, Gmail creates threads based on the “Subject” of the email. It should be “Subject” & “Sender/Reciepient”. It is very cumbersome to sort out and read mails in reference when you are dealing with two or more people with the same subject.

It all gets jumbled up.

2.  Keyboard shortcuts
Some of the keyboard shortcuts are so “short” that they get pressed accidentally. This results in a terrible anxiety.

3. Stupid web clips
It is very common to see stupid web clips like “Spam potato salad”. They do not make any sense and causes unwanted distraction.

I look forward to see these corrected very soon :)

Abhishek

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