Search Marketing Techniques Equals Spam!
Posted by glo on 18 Mar 2005 | Tagged as: Web Spam
I found an excellent article written by Alan Perkins on Search Marketing Techniques, Deceptive Advertising Laws and Other Laws. Since we bloggers are affected by deception marketing practices by deceptive SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) and so called Internet marketing experts, I believe this article tells us why we are being bombarded with comment, trackback, and referral spam and the already established laws that could be used to legally stop them. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon and maybe never, not as long as the search engines continue to reward the marketing gurus with high rankings. Yes, the marketing gurus manipulate the search engines algorithms with techniques that are deceptive but if the search engines had better infrastructures, then the deceptive tricks would not work quite so well. The average want-a-be-marketing-guru would not be able to get their piece-of-shit-affiliate-link-farm in the search engines with their spam campaigns targeting blogs, message boards, and guest books.
I am a novas about how search engines work but have been doing some research on their development which I have found fascinating. I never would have believed that I would find all this techie stuff fascination but my curious nature sends me down paths I have no control over. I do understand the benefits a spammer gets from comment spamming but I didn’t understand the referral spam thingy, especially when a blog owner doesn’t publish his/her logs. However, I discovered that some sicko-spammers steal whole sites, upload them to their own domain, a domain that may look like it has been suspended or yet to be created to a real person using a browser to view it with but it’s alive and doing very well for the search engine robots. There is no way we humans can detect this kind of deceptive practice, at least not unless we own a robot or know how to write some kind of scraping code and know what to do with it. I also read that you can change a browser into a make-believe robot.
I don’t know if it works but I read that you can make your browser look like a robot by opening REGEDIT and finding the entry for your browser’s USER AGENT. Under POST PLATFORM, create a text key something like “spam bot”. Restart your browser and punch in a site’s IP. I might give it a try when I have time to play with it.
Apparently these piece-of-shit-thieving-spammers are targeting keyphrases for relevancy and passing the PR to another domain that is viewable to both browsers and search engines, causing it to place very well in a search engine for multiple keyphrases, regardless of actual relevancy. One such site is directory.hostnetwork.org with the IP of 216.144.233.205 and they are passing PR to ndchost.com. Since they have been discovered, the whole site might have been taken down. I don’t know for sure but it was still up for the robots as of March 8, 2005.
So, in conclusion the comment, trackback, and referral spammers are using deceptive practices in order to get a better ranking in the search engines, Google in particular, and violating trespass laws that have already been challenged in the US District court by eBay against Bidder’s Edge. eBay won, read about it here. It’s been 5 years since eBay won that court case and it will take more big Internet companies filing court cases before we will see any changes in the spam problem, if at all. I’m thinking the only way we, the blogging community, will get any relief from the spammers obsession to spam us is for the search engines to make some major changes in their infrastructures and how they measure a sites relevancy to a surfers search terms.
If you’re interested in search engine development, what has already been developed and what is being developed, read this interview by Mike Grehan with Ask Jeeves/Teoma developers. I found it painfully informative with some insight into Google’s PageRank, which apparently they do not actually use according to Apostolos Gerasoulis, the founder and developer of the Teoma search engine. PageRank was developed by Jon Kleinberg and its algorithm is based on linkage data. It seems that Google’s algorithm is based more on keyword density than linkage data. So maybe the spammers have it wrong or they know something the experts don’t know. Or, they are stealing our blogs and using them to push their spammy sites up in rankings with our keywords. I don’t know, it’s still a bit mysterious to me but I’ve found it an interesting journey.
I’m going to be watching Ask Jeeves and exploring its search features. They may be on to something that will change how we experience searching in the near future. Google used to be the best in terms of quality search returns but that has changed dramatically in the past few years. When I see sites in my search returns that are ranked high and are number 1, that have little or no relevancy to what I was searching for, or they have a scant amount of information, it irritates me. I might have to go through 50 sites before I find one that actually gives me something to chew on. There’s something wrong with that picture. I do hope that the spammers are not able to completely overtake the Internet. I’ll be cheering Ask Jeeves on if they can provide good search returns and leave the spammer licking their wounds.