splogs

robwatts — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:34:09 +0000

Is that trackback link a pigs ear or a silk purse?

Did you ever look in your comments box and spot a trackback that had just your snippet and some anchor text of a site trying to rank for their target keywords? Of course you did! You probably didn’t approve it, but if you did then they got you and you are a sucker! Yet what is it with these annoying things? What is their point? Why don’t they just feck off and die a nasty somewhere?

Just this very day I received my own piece of trackback spam from a site that had been made to look like it actually added value.

The site itself had a sign up form, it talked about anti spam initiatives, it used words like community and participate, it gave account holders the option to review content requiring a sign up to view the reviews, it did lots of things that amounted to not very much. It was also butt ugly, and about as useful as a bacon sarnie at a barmitzvah. It reminded me of an old keyword stuffing project I played with some time back in 2004. Keyword after keyword after keyword supplemented with rss feeds and not very much else, and for very good reason too, but more on that later. It looked like the kind of site that you just wouldn’t really want to play in. It had no coolness factors, it wasn’t styled, it wasn’t anything really other than a big pile of texts beneath crafted titles designed to get search referals from people who knew not much better.

General Footprints and Red Flags

The site sending this particular trackback had obvious footprints, yet to some these might not have been so apparent. Not everyone looks at a site through cynical eyes, some just think ‘oooh a link to my blog, how cool’ and approve it, or worse still their blog is set to automatically approve such things.

Snippets snippets snippets

This is where it usually starts, you see a snippet a little like the one above in your comment moderation thing, you hop on over (usually out of curiosity) and find that chunk of your text in some long list of other chunks of text from other scraped rss feeds from other unsuspecting bloggers discussing similar things. No commentary, no context, just snippets.

Ads ads ads

You are also likely to see a huge smattering of contextual ads all over the shop, presented in a way that leaves you little option other than to either click an ad or hit your back button. Your reasons for interaction are limited by the lack of availability,followed very closely by the lack of motivation to do so – in essence you see very quickly that its a big pile of old crap.

Now to the person following this trackback, the semi or experienced blogger, the likelihood is that he’ll just hit his back button. He’d have seen the scraped snippets, muttered a little, (deciding it’s a splog )and left it at that. Just another one of those nonsense crap websites he’d be forgiven for thinking, yet in truth that would be about as far from the truth as you could get.

Splogging pays

These things, whilst limited in shelf life, really have a window of time whereby they earn people money. Some of these things do things like cloak the content to search referrals so that visitors don’t even get the sploggy content, instead just getting the adverts dressed up as links. Others put in sneaky noscroll attributes in the body tags and disable the history so that users have little other choice than to either hit the red x or click the advert to escape.

There’s a certain idealistic nonsense with the notion of so called ‘clean’ SERPs. Search engines like to wax lyrical about the integrity of their indexes, the natural search teams are big on extolling the virtues of their anti web spam mechanisms and creating the best experience for their users, whilst at the same time their revenue generation departments are continually looking at ways of getting their advertisers both clicks and eyeballs. It’s almost like there exists an agreement to continually disagree. There’s this very hot potato that is perpetually passed back and forth between the two departments, as these competing constituencies look to achieve their individual aims whilst continually frustrated by the requirements of the other.

Bad SERPs are Good versus Good SERPS are Bad

If we consider a notion that ‘clean’ SERPs = good user experience, and that too good a SERP = bad advertiser experience and that bad advertiser experience = low revenues, then we can begin to at least appreciate some of the reasons why sites that offer a poor user experience are allowed to thrive. We can also begin to attach legs to the idea that in lots of ways a SERP that contains an imprecise or mixed bag (think wikipedia, social media) of results that may not be as useful, might just help that user click on one of those contextual ads to the top or left of the results. Net outcome being, a dollar in the pocket of the search service.

All things to all men

I’m sure that there exists a mind or two in paid corporate search, whereby they dream of a time where every one of their top ten results is filled with a paid ad of sorts. Just think of a SERP that contained paid links for every single query! Wouldn’t that be the most phenomenal economically efficient use of it’s technology ever? Relevancy would shoot through the roof as advertisers clamoured for very specific keywords relative to their content, ad prices would rocket with SEO becoming little other than a quaint memory of some idealistic information retrieval system.

Imagine further, a world where every query had a page with a perfect score, or a page trying very hard to fit that perfect score and paying for the privilege too. We might even laugh and snort at such a conception as being completely ridiculous and unlikely, yet there is a reality that suggest that the continued upturn of investment in search and the web in general can only realistically lead to one outcome for both natural and PPC search. Those paying the money will cherry pick and invest in the keywords and topics that are most profitable, which will be those that are most easy to convert and monopolise and monetise.

The splog creators of today are the lazy version of the real content creators of tomorrow. Sites like Mahalo and wikipedia should be petrified by the likes of Google Knols a sure fire sign of where the minds at Google at least are seeing where the future lies. Heck, why return a wikipedic result when a knol of the same, can be plastered with contextual ads or subtle product placements.

Some might suggest that Knols has missed the boat already. A look at some of the SERPs of today reveals that there are a multitude of savvy site builders already seeing the benefits of associated keywords and themes; building traffic to serve the needs of people looking for information. Domains are skillfully leveraging their authority and trust scores to grow their content bases and SERP penetration, the traffic gained being used to get people to sign up to ideas, buy associated products, click on ads, make money. Every single day, the Internet becomes that little bit more commercial. Niches increasingly populated, hobbyists outdone by smooth sophisticated technologists doing the same, only better – web 2.0 versions of stuff already done. People like this certainly see the value and are actively advertising on knol based searches, already building preparing for the opportunites presented.

Idealism versus reality on a competitive planet

Of course it’s wrong to suggest that splogs and ~~mashup~~ real content creators are one and the same. They are not. Whilst they both share an equal objective of making money they are very different in one important and fundamental way in that one creates and adds value for itself and others, whilst one creates and adds value for itself alone. Therein lies the difference.

Should anything be done about companies creating real content for monetisation purposes? Isn’t it what the search engines want after all? Does it really matter that a better ‘free’ SERP damages their bottom line, or does the dichotomous nature of the factors that make up its business dictate that these are just a side effect of the business that cannot be effectively policed, not without some huge hue and cry from the publishers that benefit.

I find it a little amusing that despite all the crap, despite all the mutterings about how good content is defined as that which gives the user a better search experience and of how web spam is all evil and bad, the reality remains that these things continue to thrive, even though a responsible ad channel could reduce their raison detre in a heartbeat! Cut the ability to earn at its source and you instantly reduce the motivation to do so, right? Well perhaps not.

Impressions and clicks equals money in the bank.

Stock price is king – Despite all the words the fact is that these splog things earn them money. Forget the idea of SERP pollution, that’s just collateral damage which can be fixed with a periodic clean up; so long as the advertisers of their networks continue to see a ROI, then sites like the ones described will continue to proliferate.

What effect this will have on the whole web economy in general is up for debate. Perhaps the continual battles of the internal constituencies of the search engines themselves will help keep things in equilibrium. Perhaps it’s simply a case of one not being able to function without the other. A near perfect index, with near perfect results giving people too much choice and options would certainly lead to a diminution in click throughs to ads, whereas a SERP that went too far the other way would quickly lead to complaints and at worst lead to some altavista type meltdown of user base.

It’s a clever duck and it never stands still

What is abundantly clear is that splogs and the content that they use can be a complex moving target that is never that easy to pin down or eliminate. We can’t rely on others to deal with what is a problem for us all. We can’t dictate to the search engines that they shouldn’t allow such things to prosper as in most cases our individual voices will fall on deaf ears. It isn’t really in their interests to eliminate this stuff, and we shouldn’t be too trusting of them either. Sites labeled as thin affiliates know only too well the pain of arbitrary decisions, not to mention the individuals targeted for far lesser crimes.

As for the likes of me and you – Maybe it helps to bear in mind that we can make a difference, we can choose not to help them or make their lot easier. Look at your trackbacks critically, don’t accept them all carte blanche, take timeout to see what they are about, if you are about in forums or other blogs then think of who you are linking to and in what way, if you are a blog owner or forum operator then don’t allow these types of ‘visitors’ to use you to fuel this stuff. These people just crap on your doorstep and don’t care for the mess they leave behind. Don’t rely on nofollow to do it for you either as you never really know what power your link is giving them, be that today or a couple of years down the line!

Cheers

Postscript: I have to laugh else I’ might blub like a baby; can you believe that a mere 2 hours after writing this, 10 splogs are trackback spamming me for links, using my content and supplementing it with ads. Something tells me that RSS feed were never intended to be used in this way

splogs

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