Google Blogger SPAM Flagged Me

After trying to save a draft to my Blogger account, I was presented with a word verification test. My first thoughts were -- did I change something in my settings while prudently sipping beer last night or is there a new publish setting that I am not aware of. It was neither.

Apparantly the word verification on the posting form is meant to be a spam reduction mechanism for BlogSpot in general and there are two potential causes. One is that my blog has been flagged as potential:

...word verification is applied to certain potential spam blogs by an automated system. Because this is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is one of the false positives, we apologize. Having the word verification on your posting form does not prevent you from publishing and does not mean that your blog will be deleted or otherwise punished if it is not actually in violation of our policies.

Just great. First I am errantly flagged at Technorati which leaves your feed un-updated for days at a time; and now this. Then there is the pounding in my head from that last sip of beer last night -- isn't always that last sip that you should not have partook?

I can click on the orange question mark to take me to page where I can request a review of my blog. Funny thing is I got that little help tidbit by clicking on it the first time. Clicking on it again just takes right back there. This time, on the form at the bottom of the page where it asks "Was this information helpful?", I answered f*** no it wasn't helpful.

Another possible reason that I need word verification is if I have a high post rate.

If you make a large number of posts in a single day, you will be required to complete a word verification for each one, independent of whether your blog has been cleared as a potential spam or not. If this happens to you, simply complete the word verification for each post, or wait 24 hours, at which point it will be removed automatically.

This restriction can also be in place to control the load on BlogSpot servers as to prevent explicit spam. In this case, there is not a whitelisting review process to exempt individual blogs from it. Okay, this is the lesser of all the evils -- and hopefully that is the case.

One other thing this may be caused from was the labeling of tons of old posts from 2004, basically the same thing as tagging. In 2004, they did not have labels and I wanted to update some of these old posts. On my first run, I labeled around 80 or so posts with a "repub" tag -- my thoughts were that they are still useful enough to compile into categories and rereference them in a new post for each.

If the action of labeling/relabeling posts constitutes a publication to be issued on those posts, I did not see it take place. The only pages I would no of being actually published would be the page for the links to the labeled posts themselves. I only applied three or four labeling processes though.

Anywise, I am off to find this so called review request page. Maybe it will take me a day to find it and I will be dropped from the blacklist.

Internet Explorer does not infect PC's -- People do

In a recent experiment, security researcher Didier Stevens bought a Google ad to test user awareness of what they were clicking on. The ad was designed to be somewhat blatantly suspect and said "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" and 409 people clicked on the ad.

In the six month experiment, the ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times -- a click-through-rate of 0.16%. The Google ad campaign cost €17 ($23), or succinctly put, €0.04 ($0.06) per click to potentially compromise a machine.

Had Stevens been a real-world hacker bent on installing malware on computers thru Google AdWords, instead of a security researcher -- then the results are pretty alarming.

Equally interesting however was the relationship of browser types when the click-thru rate is compared to the market share.

According to Net Applications, Firefox now holds 15.4 percent of the browser market, while Internet Explorer has 78 percent.

Having 80.5% of the click-thrus(335) in the experiment coming from IE users is very comparable to Net Applications market share estimates.

Firefox represented 12.5% (52 click-thrus). The difference in click-thrus vs. market share for Firefox tells me that for the normal public at large, discounting the large savvy base of geeks, designers and techies who use Firefox -- the stats are saying that people are just as oblivious regardless what browser they use.

Another SEO Contest is Typhooning Our Way

Here we go again, shades of Nigritude Ultramarine. If you all remember the SEO contest from the past, which is probably one of the major reasons for the adoption of the Nofollow microformat -- it looks like there is another one on the horizon. Actually it is coming from another horizon, Indonesia, and it is called Ngadutrafik 2007 and there close to 95,000 results in Google right now.

I just spotted it in the Technorati WTF not more than a few minutes ago, and it is hitting the Hot List. Preliminary checking shows others are setting up profiles there, and looking at the SERPS a number of blogs are being set up as I speak.

There is also an entry in the Wikipedia announcing the contest, which started last April.

Ngadutrafik 2007

* Dates: 22 April 2007 – 30 July 2007
* Keyword: "Ngadutrafik 2007"
* Sponsor: www.masterseo.web.id
* Target Ending:Ngadutrafik 2007 is the topic of an SEO contest held by Adsense-Id Forum members. Ngadutrafik 2007 is a non-prized activity that challenges the members and Indonesia SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s)
* SEO Ngadutrafik 2007 Championship SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s).

One blogger with a hosted WP.com account has been suspended by Matt. Evidently a gal named Nenda ratted him out, citing abuse of the service. The controversy between the two and the aid of another blogger calling attention to it, did not hurt Nenda in the least -- her blog took a steep hike in visitors during that period

What gets me, is if these people are SEO's -- don't they know about Nofollow? Or will Nofollow really matter. They are hitting Technorati, which is nofollow. Some of the blogs they are setting up, they are actually commenting in. All of which have nofollow links. At any rate, this contest may just show us how effective (or ineffective) it is for combatting spam and whether it will curtail it or not. This will be a great opportunity to see them all out in the open like this.

In the meantime, I suggest you keep an eye on your commenting areas, forums too. It may be time to batten down the hatches before the main force blows ashore.

Just Say No to Nofollow

I disappear from the Web for a couple of years and come back to this Nofollow thing from Tom Christensen.

"... a lot of SEO types were posting about nofollow again. The new twist is they’re trying all sorts of plugins and gadgets to selectively pass or bar following links from their blogs for PR.

People, this is getting really old. And really stupid. Just turn the damn thing off already."

I am going to have to agree with Tom on this. It is really stupid.

Also, the whole Wikipedia decision to add Nofollow to outbound links is stupid. And Andy Beal's campaign to Nofollow Wikipedia is stupid, even though it looks like he is Following their lead when it comes to trackbacks and comment links. Not quite calling the kettle black, but close to a very dark grey.

Carsten Cumbrowski opines:

The hope is that the return for spamming Wikipedia will be so low that it does not even make any sense for those spammers that don’t need much return to be happy.

You can live perfectly fine in India for $1 a day for example. If Spamming Wikipedia reduces that down to $0.25, the spammer will probably look for other targets. And those other targets will also go away eventually, but that is a complete different story.

Well isn't that special! Keywords here are "other targets" (eg: You, Me and Dupree). And just how will those other targets eventually go away?

And why is it a completely different story? It is the story. Wikipedia effectively kicked the spammers out of their yard and they are coming to a neighborhood near you. Is it just me, but how does this combat spam?

Its okay to follow NoFollow. Follow?

When Google first suggested Nofollow back in 2005, it didn't take long for a spec to be drafted up by Technorati. MSNSearch and Yahoo!Search jumped quickly on board supposedly, along with scores of blog software developers and proponents.

The spec abstract has nothing to do with not following a link, just applying no weight to the link itself:

By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.

When the big three of search come out and say "they will respect Nofollow", what does that mean really? After reading dozens of comments to this regard, I am under the impression that spiders can and will follow the links if they so choose ... they just will not apply any weight to the link. A link is a still a link then.

Is SPAM the cholera epedemic of the Internet?

Should we burn down an entire village of Wikipedia huts just to eradicate a plague, only to have that plague show up in somebody elses village? Where does it stop? I think with all the Doctors and Chemists at Google General, they can come up with a better cure than this.

My hat goes off to Slashdot who use heuristics, karma and other factors in combination with nofollow to combat spam. Also, to Blogoscoped for their "fading nofollow" policy. And to other like minded bloggers who are just saying NO to NoFollow.

This is the kind of responsible forward thinking that we need to be doing, not to mention doing the SE's job for them to boot. It seems to me that any SE should have the ability to differentiate between a blog post and a comment and not apply too much weight to the comment anyway. Why should we have to tell them this?