Home > SEO News Blog > SEOmoz SPAM Outing

Translate:

Latest SEO Articles:

Speaking At:

Follow Us:

Hear Us On:

Blog Partner Of:

Helping Out:

Archives

RSS

Top Posts

Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

May 9, 2012

SEOmoz SPAM Outing

In the recent wake of the Penguin update from Google and the impact it has had on many sites, Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, announced on his Google+ page that SEOmoz is currently developing tools to facilitate the "classifying, indentifying and removing/limiting link juice passed from sites/pages."

feathers mcgraw

SEOmoz wants to develop software to add to their existing toolset available to subscribers on their website to aid in determining if their own website or a competitor’s website appears to be spammy in nature.

If SEOmoz has developed a method to analysis signals that can be used to determine if a site is spammy, it is safe to assume that Google is viewing the page or site in question in the same light. Links that are determined to be spammy will pass little link juice and could potentially incur a penalty from Google. Fishkin summed it the process by saying that if they (SEOmoz) classifies a site or page as having spammy backlinks, “we’re pretty sure Google would call it webspam.”
Some in the SEO community are angered at Rand Fishkin’s policy of “outing” SEOs for spamming practices, so this time, Rand has enlisted the public to answer whether or not he should do so.

Some of our team members, though, do have concerns about whether SEOs will be angry that we’re “exposing” spam. My feeling is that it’s better to have the knowledge out there (and that anything we can catch, Google/Bing can surely better catch and discount) then to keep it hidden. I’m also hopeful this can help a lot of marketers who are trying to decide whether to acquire certain links or who have to dig themselves out of a penalty (or reverse what might have caused it).

antispam

Preliminary results show that most are in favor of Rand’s reporting of other SEOs for spammy practices. Certainly the reporting of offenders will help Google to combat the unwanted webspam that has permeated search results since the inception of the Internet into mainstream society. It is the new mantra of the modern web; you need to follow the rules and guidelines established by Google for fear of serious reprisal – whether or not you agree with it. Ultimately, what benefits the search results, benefits the searcher.

On a slighlty related note, I would like to suggest Feathers McGraw as the new face for the Penguin algorithm update from Google…

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 10:49 am

Categories: Google,Rankings
Tags: penguin, rand fishkin, seo moz, spam —

August 9, 2011

Google+ Free For All

If you’ve been able to get on-line with all the outages this morning (EAST-1 was down for a bit) then you may have seen a number of links showing up for ‘free invites’ to Google+.

I know we did an article about the rumor that Google+ was going to accept new sign-ons without invitations on July 31st, but this came from the ‘official Facebook group’ which was a rather poor source. To my knowledge, the rumour never panned out and we still have an invite only system in place where Google can track how each person is related to the next. It’s not hard to get into Google+, it’s only difficult to do it anonymously.

Almost all the links are valid, point to a “ngemlink” path, and seem to work, even though the final section appears to be totally random:

Random invite example #1
Random invite example #2
Random invite example #3

This would mean that advertisers, groups, and other technically ‘unwanted’ new users should be hitting the system for the first time without a legitimate connection to the accounts that are letting them join? If that’s the case, where’s the response? The only thing I found related to spamming on Google threads today was this little thank you picture:

Perhaps I am in a quite circle of the web and I haven’t got the exposure to such things, but my Google+ profile has been entirely spam free. Indeed, the worst offender for spamming are associates in the SEO business that like to push out a few posts per day due to the wide range of stuff they tackle. Most of that content is related to topics that I’m interested in both professionally and personally, so it’s not really spam per se, just an excess of content that dwarfs the smaller feeds.

It’s quiet, almost too quiet..

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:43 am

Categories: Google+,internet security,link building,Privacy
Tags: google, Invitations, spam —

July 7, 2011

Google is taking out the trash

For some time now the “free hosting” Korean company Co.cc has been a target of malware, phishing, and large volumes of spam content.

Over at Google I can picture a hand full of their best ‘whack-a-mole’ admins looming over activity from .co.cc sites.

It’s anyone’s guess what kind of resources this one company has tied up over at Google (and other search engines) but I’m going with “too much” as my guess. When you consider that most of the results are spam, and the rest are mainly malware and phishing attacks, it shouldn’t be a shock that Google has done us all a favour and just blocked the whole *.co.cc stream from showing in the search results.

Sadly, spammers will be spammers and already I can see http://jzp.cc/ is acting as a portal to .co.cc sites and Google is currently showing these sites in their search results.

Wait, I see the problem! Going to need a bigger hammer!

The very unpleasant problem with this tactic is that the spam tends to just squish around, like a full diaper. The .cc TLD belongs to the Cocos Islands in Australia and while there are legit sites on that domain, the figures from the Anti-Phishing Working Group in 2010 are quite amazing. In the latter half of 2010 .cc domains accounted for almost five thousand phishing attacks in that time period!

While the percentage of good sites in the .cc realm might be questionable Google is effectively removing over 11 million registered domains run by almost 6 million users! My personal guess is that the block will stay up for some time, and once the spam has shifted elsewhere, we’ll silently see .co.cc domains back in the search results.

Google has stated they aren’t above blocking an entire bulk sub-domain in the past, they have clearly proven they will follow through, and I expect them to continue to do this as companies lose control of the content from their users.

The best way to fight spam is at the user level. Do you purchase anything that was ‘spammed’ at you? Are you rewarding people who put things on-line for your review, or are you spending money on things that are forcefully presented to you without solicitation? If the only way to make a sale is to respect the customer, retailers wouldn’t spam us because they would shoot themselves in the foot. As the consumers in this ecosystem of commerce, the matter is entirely in our hands if we so choose.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 6:14 pm

Categories: Google,internet security,Search Engine News,web hosting
Tags: .co.cc, freehosts, malware, phishing, spam —

February 14, 2011

Google Chrome Spam-Site Blocker Extension

Google has released an extension for their popular web browser "Chrome" in an effort to counter act the amount of low-quality or "webspam" sites that turn up in the Google search results. Once installed, the extension allows the end user to report any offending, spammy sites to Google.

Matt Cutts (principle engineer for Google) describes webspam as: "junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines." Read the Matt Cutts blog post regarding the Chrome extension.

This extension comes shortly after two major algorithm updates this year already as part of an ongoing effort to curb the amount of webspam polluting the Google SERPs. Recently two major sites have been accused of being content farms. Sites that employ blackhat tactics such as webspam are typically marked by frivolous or nonexistent content (JC Penny being one of them).

Google is following through on its hard-line stance to combat webspam, in an ongoing effort by Google to improve the quality of search results for its users. I applaud Google’s efforts and hope they continue with their zero tolerance policy against sites spamming the search results.

IMHO, having Google involve the online community to help monitor and report webspam is a great way to ensure that the necessary resources are available to counteract the amounts of webspam that permeate the search results. IMO, this will create a much better user experience for all involved. The fact of the matter is that there are far too many sites for the Google bots to crawl, track and monitor in an effective manner. While I do fully support Google’s ongoing efforts to reduce the amounts of webspam, the reality is that there will always be a way to manipulate the SERPs.

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 11:50 pm

Categories: Google
Tags: chrome extension, SERPs, spam, webspam —