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.

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.

Is Technorati missing your post?

In a follow up to Ping-less in Technorati there was a post from Ian Kallen that may have foretold the indexing problems they are experiencing right now. This post coincides with a lot of the Support forum queries that I observed concerning the glitches.

Even after a month, Ian still has his hands full. Only hope it lessens in the days to come.

UPDATE: Seems that I am not being indexed again. Going to bump this post and see if it may trigger it.

Are you PING-less in Technorati?

I had problems getting my blog to update at Technorati last Tuesday. When I post to the blog it automatically pings them, but nothing happened. I tried to manually ping it, and even though I got the customary "Thank You" message ... still nada.

Well after a couple of days of this, I check out the support forums and find that there are literally dozens of people with the same problem. Some have been pingless in Technorati for days, weeks, even months. well.

There is a tech guy there named Spidaman(Ian Kallen) who works at Technorati on the back end technical software. He is taking them one at a time, and every pingless problem is somewhat different.

If you are a WordPress blogger, this may interest you, actually probably would apply to most blogging software. If you use the option to publish with Gzip on an Apache 2.2 Server, then it might choke the Technorati crawler, Spidaman said. This problem appeared to happen on a few WP blogs.

The crawler is using python's native gzip library (which I believe is also linked against zlib) and I think it is the culprit, other HTTP client implementations I've tested don't have this problem. I plan on implementing a workaround soon, I suspect this is inhibiting a small but not insignificant number of sites from getting indexed.

Spidaman was helped out immensly by wa7son(Thomas Watson Steen) on the other end. Made for quick debugging. Good job.

A Joomla blog did not have a discoverable feed. Adding a link alternate tag for Real Simple Discovery should fix it.

Two WP blogs fixed themselves and another WP blog needed a support ticket opened, something "glitchy" about crawling it. [Aside] This glitchy blog is anti-Microsoft, complete with the stock warning about using a *compliant* browser right at the top of the page. Funny thing is, the CSS uses extensive hacks for IE5 involving the underscore in front of element names. Pffft[/aside]

Six blogs at Blogspot magically fixed themselves, while another four where "errantly flagged". I am assuming the same issue applied to the both.

Make sure you ping us directly, not through Pingomatic or some other third party. Please understand, our automated systems process millions of blogs everyday. The automated flagging keeps a lot of splogs out of our searches but it also makes mistakes which we regret and try to remedy as fast as we can.

The Url's from a My1Up blog are problematic because of the HTTP redirects. Will be investigated later.

One problem with Feedburner. The feed had not been updated since Friday the 13th. Spidaman suggested that he exorcise the feed daemons (verify that the feed was up to date) or take Feedburner out of the picture and ping again.

Dozens of others were answered with a simple post from unknown Admin figure who simply stated that "We've made the appropriate adjustments so that your blogs should be indexed succesfully from now on." Presumably it is another errant flag that is built into the indexing routines.

As for me, by the time I was ready to put in a support ticket my feed was magically indexed. Isn't that always the case? It is like the days when you were able to smoke in restaurants and when you got tired of waiting 52 minutes for your meal and decide to light one up.