spam

robwatts — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:26:18 +0000

Recently I had a few blogs hacked.

The reason, simple – I didn’t upgrade my WP installs and I didn’t check every single plugin I installed for safety and security (who does) . Lots of people don’t, a simple query on Google will show you 1000′s that haven’t either.

Why? Well, one of the reasons is that it used to be very difficult, or shall we say, cumbersome to do so. You had to jump through all kinds of hoops and it was a basic PITA.

Well, apparently, it isn’t anymore. There’s even an automatic upgrade wordpress plugin that checks your install and helps you sort it out.

Ok, so yes, lots of people are going to scream serves you right Rob, you should have updated your code..but come on, get real, who does so religiously and what about holidays or illness or time away from the computer, hacks are going to happen, even with the latest suped up versions.

I didn’t even know my blog had been hacked until I had a bit of spare time to check in on a few things to see how they were doing and noticed that none of them we’re ranking for jack.

I even posted a blog post a few months ago, and more or less felt it was Google just digging me out for being me or something. It turns out it wasn’t that at all, and I’d been unknowlingly linking to zillions of spammy viagra cialis crap from the footer of my pages.

The disgustingly sneaky thing about the tactic was that it cloaked the links to Googlebot, so that only Google were aware that the links existed. The graphic below is just a snapshot of the 1700 links they stuffed into my footer, at the time they were even smart enough to use a tactic that only injected them into your old posts, so a look at your search engine cache would show a nice clean, non violated blog.

Lots of other people have been caught out like this too. Michael and David Naylor being just two who spring to mind, Naylor even considered packing the blogging gig up.

I never said I was stopping blogging I’m a SEO, I work in the search engine industry and having your site dead in the biggest search engine to me just doesn’t sit right.

I felt similarly, I used to blog regularly, but sort of thought, what’s the point anymore, no fecker ever reads it, other than those who know I already exist. Google has an issue with me and I’m buggered if i have any clue what it’s all about, so…

I twittered MattCutts on the thing just yesterday, and whilst he may have a point when he says that people should keep their WP installs up to date and that I should maybe look to ask WP to come up with a better solution.

Like David though, I’m wondering why Google couldn’t alert me in webmaster tools and say hey Rob you big dummy, we don;’t want to rank your site, because you have like 1700 links to crap on around 180 of your site pages. Or Rob, go look at the cache of your pages and tell us when you’ve fixed the spam issue.

So, what to do? Some little monkey is bound to find another hole in WP, be it via a plugin or some new fangled exploit that some uber monkey forgot to consider.

Well, what would be cool, (for this little exploit at least) would be a little plugin that was part of the core install, that did things like check search caches, say once every week or so and looked for a string of words that by default was set to words like c1alis or Pr0n or V1agra etc that people could edit or add to/subtract from.

I don’t have the time, but I’m sure that some smart so and so does and he or she would get a shed load of links for writing the thing too. I’m thinking that by comparing the cached content against the actual content (allowing for the cached header difference) that people could then be informed of any discrepancies.

Alternatively, people could insert a bunch of known bad words into a text filed and have a script run a check against cached search engine versions.

There’s an idea, linkbait alert guys, maybe we need a web page version too, hey google webspam team maybe you guys can code one up and put it up there somewhere

By at least having this info, people would have some clue as to what was going on and take some form of action.

Patrick tweeted me last night and posted a reference to a google alerts method for this very thing. Whilst I think it’s an excellent suggestion, the downside is that you are limited in terms of what you seek alerts for. Not every spammer is necessarily spamming a blog with known pr0n or ph4rm generics, so you could in theory be caught out on that method too.

I asked @photomatt whether he envisages many more of these types of things happening soon . No response thus far, but hey, it is a kind of a ‘will the Horse in blue win the 3′oclock at Epsom’ type of question, no one knows until it does, and when it happens it’s all over already.

update:cool, seo idiot has made a cache checker here.

spam

robwatts — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:40:55 +0000

I was doing a little search this evening and found this amongst the results on the 1st page.

I thought it might be something related to me being signed in to a Google account so I signed out and tried again. Same result. So I opened up IE7 and same result.

I tried the same query on Google.com but it didn’t replicate.

Who is this mystery user=016597473608235241540 I wondered, no one it seems there’s a few more of them too. A little site:google.com/coop/preview query reveals just 152 results which in the grand scheme of things is just tiny . The question is however why? Why spider customer results and include them in a SERP however small the sample.

Noindex perhaps? How about robots.txt even

The result page itself has the distance in Kilometres but no link to any defined map or directions/distance page. Just two links to wikipedia – crap really, not a good user experience.

I’m sure there’s a better result out there than this one.

spam

robwatts — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:59:01 +0000

Before I say too much else I just wanted to say that generally in most cases I think it unnecessary to be too specific when highlighting the failings and flaws of others. It’s too easy to point fingers and say, oh look at how crap so and so is, or look at how so and so are doing that. In most cases it’s simply not necessary, you can say the same thing without making an enemy for yourself.

Why am I gabbing on about this? Well I guess I’ve been partially inspired by a piece by a guy named Loren Baker at search engine journal, a site I read regularly and most of the time simply love to bits. Yet today, I was left with a bit of a hmmmn taste in my mouth asking myself whether it was really necessary to out the guys he did in the way he did. In one fell swoop he has effectively smashed the revenue stream of one particular website ( or seriously diminished its efficacy) and no doubt condemned the sites advertising to declining revenue streams at some latter point.

The power of the written word eh?

Ok, so sure , anyone could have dobbed these guys in via a search engine report link, we all know that and hey perhaps people have already. The point is though that SEJ is read regularly has a hefty subscriber base what is written there is practically guaranteed to be read by Googlies and Yahoos and Msn search dudes. I don’t know Loren, so I can’t comment on the type of guy he is or even try to second guess his motives. At worst he might have a payday loans site at position 11 and at best he might just be as perplexed as us all by the apparent power of the noscript tag and authority domains and is wondering why this is still so effective, I expect it is the latter.

Where is the juice – Noscript tag or Authority domain?

To think that noscript content could have such an impact on SERPs in isolation would be pretty silly.

Lets get this straight right here right now. The noscript tag is no magic bullet. The examples highlighted at SEJ are not (or weren’t) sitting at positions 1 and 3 in Google simply because of a few links contained in a noscript tag, they were there because the sites that contained their links were from sites of multiple themes and disciplines all of which contained the hit counter code from Hitcountermaster.com.

False authority too easily attained

Why does (or soon to be did) Hitcountermaster.com have so much power and authority?

For those of you who may have been asleep for the past 3 or so years, domain authority in SEM terms relates to a domains ability to rank or convey link juice or pass pagerank. The idea is that if enough domains are linking to a singular site then it might well mean that the site or sites being linked to from so many different points (domains) in the web graph, could well be an on topic site for the keywords being used to link through to it. It’s one of the reasons why blogs and SMO sites are considered favourably in the search ranking fraternity. The idea is bolstered by the belief that individual bloggers are less interested in gaming search engine rankings than the minority of so called SEO’s and webmasters that are. The democratic effect of lots of people talking about a topic dictate that this social effect should be looked at and noticed and absorbed in any over all ranking score.

This all sounds somewhat perfect and idylic even. A meritocritous way of ranking sites from the social chatter ofweblogs and other live mediums. Harder to game, seemingly more reliable in any scoring system.

The applied semantic technology of old (we were told) was a vital tool for classifying content into its various themes and classifications. People have blogged and bragged about the importance of getting on topic themed links from related sources ( me included at some point I’m sure) yet when we look at that example it shows that in reality huge aspects of all this is bollocks. Forget your themed links from the right sites and directories, feck that, just go out and get any type of link from any type of domain that you can for your singular target keyword and…kazaaam, you’ll get the rank you want.

I was going to show what I meant further by using the Google link command link:http://www.hitcountermaster.com yet curiously it shows no backlinks already, I wonder why that might be

Anyways, not to worry we can use Yahoo’s site explorer with that funny old seo-rd parameter that they like to chuck in there and note that there are actually 2500 + reported backlinks for that domain. I can’t say whether this accurate or not as the SE’s may already have applied their SEO paranoid counter measures, but the point is, that a cursory glance over the sites shown reveals that domains that used the hitcounter code were from a very broad range of domains and blogs. They were not all from finance or loan related sites, in fact very very few of the sites discussed finance or laons in anyway at all!

Their backlinks came from .edu’s, .orgs, .coms, .co.uk blogs, websites about religion, books, wood, horses in fact you name it and there was probably a site of one sort or another linking back to hitcountermaster.com’s advertisers.

What it sreveals is that Google in particular doesn’t appear to work too hard in establishing domain authority. It seems to rely on numbers and not very much else. Why else would an uber competive term like payday loans be so easily and readily attainable?

Success for attaining payday loan SERP numero uno status was arrived at just like this.

1. Create a keyword domain that discussed finance and loan stuff within its content.

2. Get lots of links from lots of different domains with your ideal keywords

Yep, that was all there was to it. No need to get the right types of links from the right types of sites, just get links of whatever type and you are good to go.

So they went to hitcountermaster.com and checked out their advertising rates and happily used their advertising program to boost them up the SERP’s. Hitmastercounter.com had domain authority, built upon the juice conveyed back from the 1000′s of domains and sites that linked backed to it within their code. This told Google and perhaps other search engines that here was a site that was being linked to from lots of different domains and IP addresses. It must therefore, be some kind of useful resource and worthy of whatever authority score the algo decided to bestow.

Yet, if you look at that and weigh it against the idea of the social web and multiple voices linking to singular things with related keywords then you see that in this regard, hitmastercounter.com just shouldn’t have been in the same kind of crowd. It hadn’t done anything wrong, hit counters have been around long before Google or link text algorithms; it’s how they work, they sit on a site and link back to the mothership to read things like referals and times and dates and click paths.

So to me at least it shows that the whole ‘authority’ thing is at best a little weak and at worst completley and utterley underdeveloped. Why isn’t the algo detecting multiple same text incursions?

Why doesn’t it count the number of instances of keyword anchor text and decide that a number above a certain threshold or % maybe skewed and perhaps marked down a touch?

Why doesn’t it look insider the containers of where these links are found and make a judgement on that basis. In the payday loan example all of the links were inside a noscript tag! Yet, the algo again didn’t detect this fact and allowed the domain to rank for its keywords.

Why doesn’t it look at the placement of the code itself and notice a pattern? Whatever happened to the concept of Block Level Link Analysis?

The tactic as described is nothing new, there are 1000′s of others all doing the same. Just go to do a search on Google or yahoo fro free hit counter and see who is advertising. I’d bet that most are employing similar tactics to boost their own sites or sites of clients up the SERPs. It’s an exploit that is likely to be grown and adapted.

Is it going to be closed anytime soon? Hell, who knows. Surely it doesn’t take too much effort to say if link is this or that then discount its value. It makes you wonder what some of those search guys get up to all day…

spam

robwatts — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:12:21 +0000

Free content based domains are beacons for Spam

I was over at Bill Slawski’s excellent blog earlier today researching text to link proximity stuff, and stumbled across a post Microsoft Follows the Money to Find Spammers which referred to this interesting Spam research paper from Microsoft entitled: Spam Double Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers. For the geekazoids amongst you there’s lots of interesting snippets and observations. Bill’s already covered most of the headlines over at his blog, so I won’t regurgitate that.

What stuck out to me was set amongst the conclusions, the main one being that blogspot domains were the biggest culprits when it came to originators of spam.

…doorway domains, we showed that the free blog-hosting site blogspot.com had an-order-of-magnitude higher spam appearances in top search results than other hosting domains in both benchmarks, and was responsible for about one in every four spam appearances (22% and 29% in the two respectively, to be exact). In addition, at least three in every four unique blogspot URLs that appeared in top-50 results for commercial queries were spam (77% and 75%). We also showed that over 60% of unique .info URLs in our search results were spam, which was an-order-of-magnitude higher than the spam percentage number for .com URLs.

I don’t know if the findings of papers like these bear any weight or consideration in any subsequent re-jigs of search engine algorithms. Only the search engines truly know what is and what isn’t a consideration in any equation. We can certainly say that if a mainstream domain owned and controlled by a party other than the search engines were to be responsible in similar ways, then their tenure in the SERPs (search engine results pages) would be very short lived. Their authority score would suffer, as would their overall trustrank. In essence once identified they’d be dead in the water.

Search algorithms aren’t changed on a whim of course, its a relatively safe bet to assume that search models are consistently tested and evaluated internally, before any public release. Documents like the one referenced, give interesting insights into the minds of the people who look at webspam.

Perhaps it’s for these very reasons that people behind other platforms that allow human access to write and create content make such public pronouncements detailing there determinism to eliminate or at least drastically reduce spam in their indices. After all failure to do so, in light of the above for example, could quickly lead to a diminution in trust and authority with the resultant knock on effect of poor ranking ability and negative monetisation effects that would usually follow significantly reduced traffic levels. By publicly affirming their commitment to tackle it, they may well save themselves from the heavy axe a search engineer can wield.

Jason Calacanis of Mahalo was kinda right when he said

When I had SEOs on the last CalacanisCast they raved about Squidoo and it’s ability to game the system, and if SEOs love your platform you have a HUGE problem.

The fact is, that web spammers, (not all SEO’s are web spammers Mr C) will indeed game the system. Some see it as their job to take competitive edges and work with them to the max; the rationale being if they didn’t then somebody else would.

I guess its up to platform owners to ensure that access and effectiveness are reduced. It’s a big reason why wordpress and all the major blogging platforms introduced nofollow into their software. For those who don’t know, nofollow restricts the ability of a link to pass pagerank, or link juice or link love or whatever else you want to call it, to the page to which it points.

Perhaps Mahalo and Squidoo and Blogspot should just ‘nofollow’ everything they link out to, maybe they should just close it all off to spiders and bots. They haven’t been created for the benefits of search engines after all…

Perhaps serious individual content creators should just go out and buy a domain for $20, grab a WP install, get some cheap blog hosting and just run their own show. It isn’t exactly rocket science after all. It does make you wonder why a person would bother writing content and help make some other guy rich …unless of course you we’re writing it to funnel people elsewhere and monetise it to your own ends.

I do have some sympathy with what those guys say though, It narks me a little though, as it suggests that people like me are scum sucker sleaze buckets. Most of us aren’t, it’s just a small minority of uber spammer who spoil it for everyone else.

Maybe the likes of Mr Godin and Mr Calacanis could help by using the term web spammers instead of SEO’s. It’s a far more accurate descriptor.

Meantime, if you are blogging and on a free platform, then perhaps you ought to at least consider moving on..

spam

robwatts — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:18:07 +0000

I like the Akismet spam catcher feature of wordpress, it catches a shed lot of stuff that I’d otherwise have to fanny about with.

Occasionally it makes a little mistake and puts a genuine comment or two in to the sin bin but on the whole it does a pretty good job.

Usually I just delete and forget, but today one actually raised a smile so here I am blogging about it.

I found myself thinking, well um…, if I knew who you were I’d really love to answer.

I’d like to be able to track you down and ask you why you seriously bother with this stuff. Do you really think it works anymore? What do you expect me to say in response to your post? Gee thanks! I’m so glad you stopped by and shat on my page Please do come back and shat some more, thanks very much no really! No, exactly, unlikely.So ok, if you are an A grade arse (and I suspect you are) you probably use some kind of automated script that scans serps and looks for various strings in various well known blog platforms hoping that you hit lucky and find a blog that doesn’t premod or add nofollows. Heck, I bet you don’t even care about the nofollow thing too, its a link after all right?

Its not victimless dude, it wastes peoples time, its negative karma, it’ll come back and bite you on the arse, do yourself a big one and stop…At least consider using the little tenure you have left on this earth to do something meaningful and productive, this really isn’t good stuff, seriously.

So if any Y! rep out there is reading this and has a way of locating mr pokercool@yahoo.com and deleting his arse out of existence then hey, dont let me stop you, I’m sure he’d appreciate it. :D

spam

robwatts — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:00:49 +0000

Nofollow and wordpress why I’m removing the rewrite

I was having a read here and there today about nofollow, and was left saying to myself hmmn well at least I don’t employ the damn thing, and if I do its usually with a nudge and a wink poking fun at something or other. I then fired up the firefox search status plugin and switched on the highlight nofollow option and carried on flicking through various tabs and links surprised to see the number of red rel nofollow flags popping up here there and everywhere.

It was kind of ironic to read Andy Beal’s mini diatribe about wikipedia only to see his comments section littered with a whole lot of red dashed boxes! Every single link in every commenters comment, including the link to their sites are nofollowed, even Andy’s own!

Ok, so this isn’t Andy Beal’s fault, he like me is just using the standard WP install, which adds a rel=nofollow to both the url of the poster and any links contained in the comments of what the poster says. I laughed until I went through some of my earlier posts and saw I was doing the very same!
So, whats the problem with that you might ask, why do I care that a person who has dropped by and taken the time to say a word or two on an opinion I’ve voiced be nofollowed? Well, see, people like Matt Cutts say this

“From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted”

Yahoo on their searchblog had this to say.

By adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to hyperlinks, webmasters and weblog owners can tell search engines that the links are effectively untrusted.

MSN or Live as they are now calling themselves had this to say

One thorny source of spam that we’ve seen is people stuffing blogs with comments that include links back to their sites. We have taken some steps to combat this – but we really wanted to find a way to put bloggers back in control.

I was excited to wake up this morning to an email from my long-time friend and college roommate who is currently an engineer working on search at Google. Don’t worry Paul – I won’t blog any outrageous stories about our time at Princeton.

Paul told me that Google is planning on announcing support for a tag on individual links. Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking. Our Search Champs suggested this and it has been a part of our plans since, we think it’s a great idea.

In principle, yes great , hell why not. Who’d really want to give comment spammers the added incentive of link love? The whole I don’t trust this link idea was vaunted as a huge step forward in the fight against blogspam and comment spammers intent to gain links in numbers. For the search engines there was an added bonus in that they proffered the suggestion that it would also help in their battle to save their link text based algo’s from any SEO manipulations. It then went on to become a stick to bash text link traders and site owners looking to capitalise on any marketing opportunities brought about by way of weight applied to their sites by IR ranking systems. Use nofollow in your sponsored links or else suffer a ranking consequence, at least that’s what’s inferred.

Getting back to the point though, about trust and why I’m removing this nofollow injection. Its like this. I pre moderate all my comments. I read every single thing that people take the time to tell me about. I follow the links they post, I read what they have to say. If I think its nothing but a self promotional comment, then I delete/edit as I see fit. In other words, if the comment is here on my blog, then I’ve personally taken the time to evaluate what they’ve said and effectively sanctioned the reason why they’ve decided to link to whatever it is they are linking to, to support their viewpoint. I trust them.
Why would I want to nofollow them all? Where is the respect due to my commenters there? Why shouldn’t they get a little bit of extra reward via some miniscule amount of rankjuice for their efforts?

“Hey, thanks for commenting dude I don’t trust you, or what you had to say, so I’m going to do those search engines a big old precautionary favour and nofollow your links.”
Gee thanks Rob…

I agree too, not nice, or necessary even.

Ok, so I could well be a pagerank hoarding mudder fudder intent on holding what little linkjuice I have for personalised projects; you know the drill, funnel that ol pagerank down a little tube and point it at something I want to promote.You know what though? Longterm, that approach will die a death, if it hasn’t done already. Waste of blooming time and energy if you ask me.

Anyways, all my comments are now dofollow, read, vouched for and trusted.
If you want to do the same and have a wordpress install then go to your install directory and look for functions-formatting.php and comment-functions.php. You basically want to look for the word nofollow in links and replace it with emptyspace.

(Click image to enlarge)

spam

robwatts — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:10:11 +0000

Graywolf blogged about some Disney Blog getting de-indexed for hidden text.

Seems that some blogging platforms/cms’s have issues that could get your site removed for web spamming by inserting text that is hidden.

One commenter there had this to say:

Some freely available WordPress templates (specifically from blogthemes.com)contain hidden links from the designer linking to certain cancer websites. I am sure most people do not see that as it is kind of sneaky.

I do wonder why they don’t just ignore such aspects for ranking purposes. If its identified as hidden algorithmically then it can be ignored as a ranking factor too…no? Or am I missing some bigger picture here.

If you are ever muzzled watch stuff like this and rejoice

spam

robwatts — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 10:42:50 +0000

Say yes to Blogging

So, Ive blogged now for a little over a week. Ok, so Ive blogged in the past on other topics, but not as consitently or comprehensively; at least in the sense of making posts longer than 20 or 30 words and posting everyday writing unique and semi compelling stuff!

Why am I so surprised that I’m actually enjoying writing about things I find interesting, amusing and entertaining? I haven’t got any huge audience or anything like that, and to be frank I’m not too bothered. I’m just enjoying the process. Its cathartic even, its good to talk.

As Ive said previously. I have blogged before. Some of the stuff I blogged on was kinda personal. I blogged about my divorce for example, it was an excellent vehicle that helped deal with a shitty time in my life. Ive blogged about my everyday life – its ups and its downs, mostly just sporadic moans and rants.

Ive also tried to blog on random stuff too. In my silliness, I once said, I know, I’ll blog on anything and everything, cobblers to focus, who needs that! So was born my first splog.

Say no to Splogging

So I built this site, it was a combination of a blogging module and a mishmash of other stuff I’d coded and plugged in. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but in retrospect I had created a splog. Not just any old splog mind. It was a well crafted juicy splog that when viewed 1st hand, looked nothing like a splog. The whole thing was really just an exercise in intellectual curiosity.

I had a domain name that I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with, I’d been fannying with Drupal, I’d seen a few community blog type sites grow pretty quickly and wanted to have a little play about to explore some of the issues and get a feel for what it could and couldn’t do. I justed wanted to stick the modules up and play about with it and stick things on to the front and the back and the side, like some Blue Peter toy made out of cardboard tubes and coloured paper almost. I wanted to see how quick I could get it spidered, how deeply it would be crawled, how often, by whom, how well it would rank, how quickly, how people reacted to ad placement and all manner of other things that simply unavailable through any other route. You can’t read about this stuff, you have to go through the curve and experience it.

The home page had real posts from real people. Heck I even had people sign up and post their pics and write stuff about their lives and all that. I also had a database with 20 odd thousand keywords. I plugged these words into a template and let the spiders do the rest. I fed in RSS search feeds to supplement the ‘content’, I used the tagging systems pumped out by things like de.li.ci.o.us and Flickr to give each page a unique look and feel. I mixed things up and varied the layouts and KW densities based on the length of the url or sector it pertained to or some other random variable, I did everything I could to push the envelop as far as I could and to see where it would go, hell I even took the piss on the domain name, using a well known spamming term. At the time, the way I saw it there was no harm done. Search engine spiders lapped it all up, I got visitors and some signed up and participated. Those who didn’t sign up to the program, clicked on ads relative to the keywords – win win, they got what they wanted , I got paid a few cents for their efforts and advertisers got on target searchers in kw focused search mode.

Eventually, as was inevitable. The site got pulled from the SE db’s. What had taken me a little over a week to code and set up, at its peak had 50k pages in the SE databases and received around 1500 visitors per day at its peak, with most of them coming from MSN and Y!, Google at least was considerably smarter, but still gave me long tail referals.

Was there a point, why even?

Was it worth it? Yes, as an exercise in education and observation, absolutely.

If I’m honest there have been times when Ive said to myself I could have put in a little more effort at the outset and actually made something worth having long term even; ok thats an understatement I could have put in a whole lot more effort, but that would have required real work and effort outside of playing about with a bit of PHP and SQL, I’d have had to involved other humans :-0 built a little community thing even, generated a little buzz and excitement, made something useful.

Easy to game search engines?

It does kinda beg the question of how it was that easy to get 100k visitors in such a short period of time for something of such little use and value, taking next to no time to develop which was nothing other really than an ugly keyword splog!

See the way I see it, my big pile of poo shouldn’t really have been able to rank for anything, cos really it was saying nothing at all. It offered very little that was original. It basically rehashed and spewed out that which already exists out there already. I still have the scripts and the database, so could always stick it all up on another database and see…but I won’t, I can’t be bothered, it served its purpose, to do so would feel unkarmic.

Today, I doubt the same approach woulld work. The SE’s are whole lot smarter. They are learning from all of these other social media metrics. They are looking at what is getting buzz, who is talking about what in which space and why, they are actually applying these factors to their algos. They realise that its simply not good enough to rely on factors that given a little effort, are so relatively easy to manipulate. They are looking at how people vote with their fingers and mice, studying the demographic and seeing where they go. Google reader, feedburner, delicious, toolbars, youtube, myspace, blogging platforms and all manner of other popular services enable them to glean so much more than they once did.

Sympathy for the devil

It must be damn hard to be a SE engineer these days, constantly firefighting, tweaking, playing. In fairness to them, they are doing a pretty good job, but still have a way to go of course, its the nature of the beast they’ll always be playing catchup of one form or another. Web Spammers or people just looking to rank well for their topics and interests will go to exceptional lengths to get to where they or their clients need to be. Most of us are natural born problem solvers, its what we relish. Search engine algos are just another problem to be figured out and solved. It is certainly a whole lot harder to rank for something worth ranking for. Domains do get filtered/penalised every day, just go and have a read up over on any SEO forum to see examples of people screaming and wailing. It really is getting to be about content content content.

Can you still spam your way to the top using splogs or other well known spamming practices and methods? Well, you’d like to think not or yes even, dependant upon your view. If the SE’s know a method exists then they’ll look at ways of minimising its efficacy, thats for sure. The trick really is to just work hard on something of value and the rest will follow naturally. I’m seriously of the opinion that heavy duty old style spamming just isn’t worth the effort. You may as well plough those very same efforts into something worth building and growing.

IMHO of course