Spamhuntress

I was looking for something specific on Google Groups. When I hit sort by date, I found almost only typical free for all posts. Turns out all those Google groups you can start are often full of what I’d term spam.

So, what we need is a way to blacklist certain groups individually. Which means, if I’m logged in, there should be a button next to each group (even if it’s a usenet group) that let’s me killfile it. Killfiling has been used on usenet for years to avoid having to see posts by trolls and people we dislike. What we need at Google Groups is a way to killfile entire groups so we don’t need to see the search results.

One especially bad group for my particular search term was “Mommies at home” and “Network Moms” (typical feminine topic, so that makes sense).

But there are loads of those groups, and with time, the pollution is only going to get worse!

I was tipped of a site that had some hanky panky going on.

I noticed a large area of empty space, and highlighted it. Come to find a large number of links to high profile websites. Some of the links are to rather unsavory characters (180solutions ring a bell?), as well as to loads of search engines and e-commerce sites as well as portals and other stuff.

My guess is, this is an attempt at having links TO sites with good standing in the search engines, but at the same time hiding them from users, so the links won’t ACTUALLY lead to anyone clicking on them. The links are there for the benefit of the search engines.

So yes, this is against the webmaster guidelines at Google, at the very least. Which means I label it search engine spam.

See for yourself:
diamonds-chicago.com/diamonds_chicago_map

In addition, this entity has three websites with similar content, though not similar enough so the duplicate content penalty kicks in:
diamond-jewelry-store.net
diamonds-wholesale.net (check out the invisible keyword stuffing at the bottom!)

I did a search for blog blasters, and found some “verboten” programs in Adwords at the top of the page again.

blog blaster - Google Search

Google really need some Adwords policing!

These domains are banned from the index, yet the Adwords program accepts them?

Update: Did you see his reason for selling? It’s pure BS, if you check what he said earlier on Michael Pollitt’s blog.

I think I’ve uncovered a new type of spam. I don’t know if it works as intended, but I found something that must have been done on purpose.

Remember the Dorank spammer? He was just tossed from his webhost, and found a new one. So I was nosing around a bit.

He has some sort of affiliation with cs.rin.ru, and I was doing some searches when I came upon something that might be an experiment, or a spamming attempt.

Check this Google search:
inurl:cs.rin.ru -site:cs.rin.ru

You’ll find lots of indexed instances of cacheing or mirroring. What I’d term vulnerable PHP scripts.

Most of the instances are only in the Google cache. They don’t work live right now. But I tested one site that allowed me to cache spamhuntress. Brrrr…

Either way, I think some checking of PHP and Google coding is in order.

I got a referrer from a subcategory on a site named recommendlist.com. It’s a scraper directory. No original content whatsoever.

I searched for the name. Google nixed the domain, but there are still lots of references to it. And since it’s a scraper directory with no original content whatsoever, the sites it’s mentioned on are either scraper directories themselves, or the site has been spamvertized.

And in this case, major case of scraper directories.

Matt, you could zap a lot of them just by following that one around!

I love my buckwheat hull pillows. But I need to replace at least the oldest one. Problem is, they’re no longer a novelty item in Norway, so I need to find some place to buy them. So I tried a search for the Norwegian term, and didn’t get very far. Then I tried this search term:

buckwheat pillow norge

The last one is the Norwegian variant of “Norway”. Result: Lots of search engine spam. Nonsense pages designed to pollute the search results, and force me to choose one of the pages in desperation and click on Adsense or whatever payoff (affiliates) they’re using.

I’m sick and tired of it!

Just because I used a juxtaposition of terms that aren’t often found on the same page, doesn’t mean I’m open for being conned!

I think we need a scraper site database. Preferably one Google would use to blacklist the sites in question, AND revoke their Adsense accounts.

I’ll go first, creating a temporary wiki page where we can leave our frustrations (and I left my current one). But hopefully we can get something along the lines of the splog databases.

Such as splogspot and antisplog. net (currently misconfigured server).

I got three comments in my moderation queue a few days ago. I didn’t approve them, even though they were obviously entered by hand and on topic. Why? I’ll tell you later, but first let’s check them out:

————

Commenting on “MSN algo change more spammy”

I agree. simply by looking at my own site..just started 7 days back and now i have 1000 pages indexed in MSN already. Talk abt. getting crawled. It used my 10mb b/w to crawl the pages.

Thanx, Admans.

———-

Commenting on “Netsphere domain parking”

I have been in discussion at the digitalpoint thread. This is very serious issue.

Thanx, Admans.

———–

Commenting on “Spammers use old MX records”

Nice info…thanx mate…

Thanx, Admans.

————-

Let me introduce to you:
Saurav Bhaduri

General Adsense and SEO addict

Check out the general type of posts he makes on Digitalpoint.

So, why am I ticked off at him?

He entered manual comments, and on topic, so what’s wrong?

He used HTML in his comments, entering two links to his key sites under a few characters of his name, so that it looks like this:

To me, that looks like an attempt to sneak by me links I otherwise might not have approved. Bloggers get one link (and he had one in the website field too), but I don’t want to see links on my blog for commercial sites of that ilk.

Don’t let me catch anyone doing that again…

——–

I paged through his posting history on Digitalpoint, and found a thread where he offered to sell links. All blogspot blogs have since been removed. I assume they were removed by blogspot, but who knows. I guess they could have been splogs? No way to know this long after the fact, of course.

But the general point here is that you’re generally likely to see links from several sources on splogs in the future. And my advice would be to NOT buy links on splogs, for all kinds of reasons.

Oh my, I found a reference to one of those splogs, for lifting content without permission. And one guy who responded to Admans request to review his blogs, saying they’re splogs.

I found an Adsense ad on my own site (not this one, but another). I found it interesting, so I copied the URL word for word and visited the site. You see, not only was the topic interesting, but I couldn’t see how that could be easily monetized.

Here’s the exact text of the ad:

Cyber-Bullying help
Cyber Bullying has become a major problem in America. Help is here!
www.joshuassite.com

Problem was that when I visited the site, there was this poorly written text, generally about cyber bullying. At the bottom, there was an e-mail address for contacing “us”, and a link for
“Visit us at:”

Guess what…

The link was an affiliate link to a porn site. It wasn’t even disguised.

But internet noobs would still click on it and get shocked.

This is bait and switch, and it’s probably just beginning!

———–

A little bit about the owner of the site.

I was searching for info on a specific motherboard today. And one of the hits high up in Google was a scraper site. So OBVIOUSLY a scraper site. It had an on topic file name and heading, and then Adsense taking up much of the window. The bottom half of the screen was some generic nonsense about computers. It’s as if they’d used mail merge in Word to get the name of the motherboard in there, in a generic generated text. At the bottom there SEEMED to be the typical scraper links. Except they’d switched the real links for links to that SAME page.

Grrrr….

How many times have we heard scraper site/search engine spammers say they think their pages add value to search results? Exactly how dumb do they think we are?

And just so we can compare oranges to oranges, here’s the page:
computer-infocentre.com/intel-ga-6zma.html