Commenting on spamresources
McAfee’s site advisor is ranking very high in Google these days. Which means people are likely to check out what they have to say about domains they’re looking for.
Their testing is not always entirely accurate. Take Spamhuntress as an example.
They put one bad mark against my site for linking to a site they classified as bad.
But you can put up comments on sites, whether you own them or not.
That should be a golden opportunity to comment on spamresources. Especially domains we’re likely to see as nameservers for spammy domains. Webhosting and registrars often used by spammers.
Just one caution: If you do comment on other people’s sites, be responsible. Don’t be rude. Don’t get sued for libel. What you write needs to be true at the time of writing, and you’d better be prepared to show evidence of what you write.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I have been using the SiteAdvisor Firefox extension for a while now. I really like it though I don’t normally have a problem identifying bad sites myself. I mostly installed it for testing to see if I should suggest it for others. I do think it is a big help.
I did sign up to be able to rate sites. I found it really can’t be used against web spammers based on the rules for reporting a site and the options to choose from. They were only concerned about phishing and email spam last time I checked.
Your site is now listed as green though it still shows the questionable link.
September 19th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Can’t complain about Site Advisor as it stopped me from hitting a VERY BAD page, I was impressed.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Does SiteAdvisor consider the NOFOLLOW attribute in its analysis?
When you list a “black hat” URL or IP, perhaps munging it in some way would prevent the warnings on SiteAdvisor. However, SiteAdvisor posted a disclaimer: “Security-related site / This is a security-related site that links, as part of its analysis, to downloads that some people consider adware, spyware or other unwanted programs.”
September 20th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
Why should it? NOFOLLOW is (usually) invisible to the end-user, so there’s nothing to discourage a malicious site from using it on its link to malware. If they did treat it as a get-out-of-red card, it would just encourage the bad guys to start using it, thereby eliminating its value as an indicator.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:11 am
The yellow link they attribute to Spamhuntress’ site was due to a link on her wiki. External links on her wiki are all have the nofollow attribute. So SiteAdvisor does count nofollow links. Kelson is right, if they allowed linking to bad sites as long as nofollow was used, that would make the service far less useful. The only sites that are likely to be linking to bad sites are ones discussing spammers or ones that are so heavily spammed they no longer clean their site. The first case is exactly what Spamhuntress has, clearly the hit your site gets from linking to a bad page can be overcome.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Recently several anti-spyware forums/websites were marked as bad due to links to bad sites in HijackThis logs. I was told at the time that Site Advisor is in the process of whitelisting security sites. This site and your wiki should be whitelisted.