'Online Poker' Googlebomb

Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."

Unprotected

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google.

And the Wikipedia page is not protected [wikipedia.org] right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page [wikipedia.org] link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link [wikipedia.org] and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism [wikipedia.org].

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who saw a fucking DISTURBING image when loading this page?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

WARNING

[Nailer]

The link is now a pciture of someonee fellating themselves.

Better way to fight it

[teslatug]

Wouldn't it be better to implement the rel="nofollow" [google.com] for these links? After all, they should be trying to punish the spammers, not reward Wikipedia (which is good but doesn't help with the spam problem).

Wikipedia link not safe for work?

[no soup for you]

The current link to Online Poker in Wikipedia is redirecting me to something I'd rather never have seen.

Here's the Google Cache [64.233.167.104] of the actual Wikipedia article (until somebody over there figures out why I was sent to an auto-fellatio site)

Re:solution for Wordpress

[isometrick]

Rusty on k5 recently pointed out an interesting scam that works against captchas like this.

Apparently spammers were putting up free porn sites, but to get the free porn you had to enter the answers to captcha prompts that were scraped from other sites. People love their porn, so this gave them thousands of valid captcha responses.

People in these industries are evil, yet seemingly very creative.

Re:W3C non-compliant

[ikkonoishi]

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

RYOFA (Read your own fricking article)

Bloggers - Be articulate.

[anagama]

Bloggers bug me. The caption should be understandable by blog-free geeks, not just those on the inside. A concise one sentence explanation clearly describing WHY the bloggers are doing this would make the whole thread much more useful. As it is, I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why bloggers were googlebombing the wiki. Please, when a reason exists for some fact, state the damn reason clearly! Example: Bloggers, frustrated by poker sites posting spam in the comments sections which follow blog entries, decided to fight back by displacing comment-spammer's rank in google searches. .... then insert the rest of the caption.

And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.

Grrrrrr. How's that for bitterness! ;-)

Re:Google [ play online poker ]

[Zeinfeld]

TONS of people play poker online, and they give MASSIVE referral bonuses to websites who can generate new players ($65 a pop!) -

Wow! time to change my slashdot sig!

I know, I'll buy Goat.cx and redirect it to a poker site.

dealing with comment spam

[exhilaration]

I do not want to divulge them publiclly

Well, for everyone else, here are some strategies to combat comment spam. There should be plugins or upgrades available for whatever software you're using that add these features:

1) Add ref="nofollow" [slashdot.org] to all links posted. Google will then ignore this link when assigning pagerank. This is invisible to the user.
2) Force the browser to calculate a javascript hash [weblogsinc.com] everytime a comment is posted. This prevents automated spambots from posting comments. This is invisible to the user.
3) Filter for common words (viagra, poker) then manually approve those comments. This is a lot of work for you, but no work for your users.
4) Use captchas [wikipedia.org] - your users must type in the text in pictures when posting a comment. This is extremely intrusive for your users.
5) Approve every comment. Lots of work for you.
6) Disable comments. It's better than giving up your blog as, sadly, many people are choosing to do.

Re:I don't understand

[Feynman]

Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?

Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's [useit.com] Alertbox [useit.com] posted today [useit.com]:

Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

Re:Greedy abuse of Wikipedia

[drendite]

It's quite possible for an intelligent player to make money playing poker in the long run. This is because you are playing against your opponents, not the house. Your opponents will likely make mistakes that you can profit from. True, the house takes a portion of the money from each pot, but a skilled player can usually overcome the rake for a decent winrate. If all players are equally skilled, they will all lose money.

Period outside quotation marks

[ccmay]

Should read: rhyme with "merrible."

Not necessarily. Putting the period inside the double quotes is accepted American (and I think Canadian) usage.

British people, and most other English speakers elsewhere in the world, put the full stop outside the quotes.

-ccm

Re:Google [ play online poker ]

[koan_72]

Add the nofollow [google.com] tag to your links in the HTML code and spammer won't benefit from their spam campaigns. Many major logs, wikis, guestbook programs have started this practice.

nofollow won't stop it.

[blowdart]

But the spammer doesn't care. They don't check if you're using nofollow, they just vandalise your comments and run. Thinking nofollow will stop this type of spam is akin to thinking spam assassin or dnsBLs stop spammers. It hasn't, it just means the crud doesn't end up in your inbox.

I've ended up having a little database [idunno.org] which holds both referral spammers and comment spammer URLs, so anyone who either tries to send an http request with a site listed as the HTTP referrer or post a comment with those sites in gets redirected to a permission denied page.

But I could do that because I'm vain enough to roll my own code (and embarassing it is too). Most bloggers will have to wait for their blog software authors to add something like that and then for their hosts to update.

Now what we really need is something akin to the SURBL [surbl.org] where blog spam and referral spam urls end up, then plugins for every major blog engine out there to use it.

Googlebomb "HTTP" as well, now shows Microsoft :(

[simos]

If you search for "HTTP", you get as first choice the Microsoft Website, which is a bit of an irony. The proper result should be http://www.w3.org/

Why this matters?

Because when you just type "http" in the address bar of Firefox and press enter, it takes you directly to Microsoft!

In addition, if a URL is malformed, such as "http://http://www.slashdot.org/", it tries to resolv "http" and takes you to Microsoft. Try with Slashdot.org [http].