[IP] more on 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mary Shaw <mary.shaw@gmail.com>
Date: October 26, 2005 9:47:15 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: Roy h Weil <roy@shaw-weil.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google


Not only that, they're also parasitizing wikis.  What should we call  
this?  Whamming?

I set up a little Wiki at http://www.science-of-design.org for the  
Science of Design community in CS to share ideas and (principally)  
contribute to an annotated bibliography.  We decided to try the  
reasonable person principle first and allow anyone to contribute  
without registering -- we did not want to place any impediments in  
the way of shy people, and we have no interest in collecting personal  
information.

Yesterday I discovered that the Main and Help pages had become  
carriers of links that are probably to drug ads.  Chief offenders  
appear to be joia[dot]com, warp0[dot]com, and phentermine-online[dot] 
various-stuff[dot]obscure-country-code.  Most of the offending edits  
simply appended links to the end of the pages in such a way that they  
don't show up when the page is viewed.  I only noticed when one of  
them replaced the entire main page with these links.  I assume their  
purpose was to increase Google ranking.

We took the minimalist action of restricting editing of the Main and  
Help pages to sysops, hoping that the vandalism only involves  
scanning for open wikis and changing the pages that are always there,  
not chasing links into the site. If  necessary, we'll reluctantly go  
to editing by login only.


On 10/26/05, David Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com >
Date: October 26, 2005 1:24:56 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google



'Splogs' Roil
Web, and Some
Blame Google

By DAVID KESMODEL
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
October 19, 2005; Page B1

Spam, long the scourge of email users, rapidly has become the bane of
bloggers too.

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from
gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as
"splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other
Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like
those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their
rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to
them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity.
Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a
few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.

The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on
providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to
let bloggers create blogs.

Just this past weekend, Google's popular blog-creation tool, Blogger,
was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than
13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with
popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog
searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs
were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.

...

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/
SB112968552226872712-8b5l_fijhNltE4s7DX6tvLI9XNo_20061025.html




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