spam

Someone commented on here the other day saying Google employed 20,000 humans to manually review sites for spam. I hadn't heard this number before, but it makes sense to me. There is only so much you can do with an algo, so it makes sense they have an offshore warehouse somewhere full of low-cost employees working on manually removing sites that look like spam. So, with that in mind, SEO is...
> articles/the-sniff-test/

I'm revamping the tags system in Jojo CMS[1] this weekend, as we need a user interface that can scale well as more and more tags are added to sites (potentially thousands of tags). A simple list of all tags no longer works in this instance, so I'm basing the system around a search, with related tags being returned via AJAX to give the user an idea of what is already in the system. EXTERNAL...
> articles/spamming-the-api/

I was faced with the recent challenge of adding a search facility to a medium sized directory website. I have written custom search algorithms before, and it's generally a game of cat and mouse of tweaking / testing to get the right amount of relevance. As soon as you change the balance in one...
> articles/128/spamming-your-own-search-results/

A competitor of mine in a particular market has shamelessly scraped some content from a big US player. The kind of shameless scraping where they forget to find-replace (company name) with their own name. The natural instinct is to send one or both parties a polite message to see if someone can...
> articles/127/not-getting-involved/

There is something about this search result that bothers me. Here we have a Google search for "text link ads" and oddly enough www.text-link-ads.com doesn't show up first, or even in the first 3 pages of results I checked. Oh, but they have the top position in the sponsored results. Please...
> articles/118/too-spammy-for-organic-but-well-take-your-adwords-dollar/

A lot of blog authors are joining the dofollow revolution, and are hacking their Wordpress installs to remove the ugly rel=nofollow attribute from comment links. I'd like to announce a new feature of this blog, and other blogs based on Jojo CMS[1], where a good comment is rewarded with not only a...
> articles/106/do-follow-would-you-like-anchor-text-with-that/

Last night I was minding my own business, cutting some code, when the blog comments started to race in. But rubbish spam comments, not real ones. I haven't had a big problem with spam since installing a simple CAPTCHA on my comments and contact forms, and where my previous spam:real ration was...
> articles/102/has-my-3-letter-captcha-been-hacked/

I just got tricked into clicking on Google's Adsense today, and I thought it less than amusing how they are starting to use the same dodgy tricks as the other MFA (Made For Adsense) spam sites out there to get more clicks. I'm working on a different monitor today, on a LCD which is a bit...
> articles/96/googles-sponsored-links-getting-sneakier/

I was having a look at my site stats from yesterday, and came across a result I wasn't expecting. Apparently someone found me for "BUY PROPECIA"??? This seems odd, because I don't sell propecia, and because it seems like a really good profitable phrase to be ranking for if you do happen to...
> articles/71/buy-propecia-how-blog-spam-brings-you-traffic/

Here's a little story about a spam report I submitted in February 2006 to Google, Yahoo and MSN for a competing site. Submitting a Google spam report[1] is common practice these days, but the yahoo spam report[2] and MSN spam reports are less common. The site in question had the works -...
> articles/41/spam-reports-google-yahoo-msn/

The ancient art of creating doorway pages is now frowned upon by the SEO industry, and it's likely to get your site banned. But what about creating legitimate doorway pages using your articles?...
> articles/18/legitimate-doorway-pages/