I know of someone whose blog was identified as spam by the intelligent Google robots. I won’t reveal his identity directly, but it may become all too evident. But first the blog URL. Wait, this link could be more useful.
Well, what are spam blogs? See below but do notice that the ‘link spamming’ links to the wikipedia. Google, who prefers to answer queries in terms of their own sites such as webmaster help, blogger.com, google groups etc. was rather squeamish about this. It quoted wikipedia, their arch rival. Google obviously doesn’t want to spell out its own, great link spam detecting algorithm. I am quoting their definition below.
“What Are Spam Blogs?
As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.
Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people’s writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.”
My friend (I am not saying he is not me) was rather surprised at how the search engine giant’s bots could make this stupid mistake. More importantly why they were taking so long to infer.
In order to have the timestamp of the event, I am copy-pasting this:
” Manage Your Blogs
Create a Blog | Help
Physiology physics woven fine
View Blog in New Window View Blog
110 Posts, last published on Mar 30, 2008
This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.
This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review.
Request Unlock Review
New Post
Manage: Posts, Settings, Layout
The latest from Blogger Buzz
Blog List, Scheduled Post Publishing on Blogger in draft
April 2, 2008 — permalink”
Its unfortunate how a smart bot can make such an un-smart mistake. We see many fraud sites in the newspapers everyday. When we type the web address(es) in the browser’s address bar and click ‘go’, we get navigated to the most unholy of places, right under Google’s nose. What does Google do about it? It allots them PageRank! And what does it do when it sees a legitimate site; it marks it as spam.
How should I term it? A googol (10100 ) of a mistake or Man-Machine conflict?
While doing a post-publish survey, it occurred to me that “this link” will possibly not be displayed in your browser. Google itself indulges in a procedure called cloaking when it serves an ad (or other) to different geo localities. Though cloaking is strictly prohibited for use by others, Google by adopting and implementing it, may NOT show the intended page to your browser.
Tags: blogger, blogspot, bots, google, robots.txt, SEO, SERP, spam blogs
