Wiki Link Spam Tactic

[Garrett]

Thanks for the clarification, Philipp. I was too quick to compare wiki sandbox spam and guest book spam.

I agree with you that putting backlinks in a wiki sandbox is not a very serious business strategy.

[rlmrdl]

If I would have a commercial business, I would not put backlinks in Wiki Sandboxes. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a very serious business strategy.

Is completely rational. Spending valuable time horsing about in wiki sandboxes installing links that any wiki owner will have automatically deleted every few hours anyway, is not a serious strategy.

If there was any chance they would be permanent, such as in automated guestbook links back, it might have some value, but even then, there is little guarantee of the kind of permanence that a serious business needs.

Building better content, setting up bona fide relationships, or contributing something of value to another site, attached to your link, are better uses of the available resources.

BTW, this board hates Opera.

[mbrubeck]

I posted this response in Philipp's forum:

I am a member of several open-source software projects that use wikis as tools for open collaboration. The spam in our wikis hurts our development efforts in several ways.

First, it spams the RecentChanges pages, making it less useful as a change notification system. In many cases, this also spams the mailboxes and newsreaders of users who subscribe to RecentChanges notifications. We are no longer able to use the wiki as a communications tool because most of the messages are generated by SEO spam.

Second, it puts off-topic words and phrases into our wikis. This causes them to show up in completely unrelated web searches. Strangers then find our wikis thinking that they are related to other topics, and edit pages without realizing what the site's actual purpose is.

Third, in order to fight these effects, we now need to spend ridiculous amounts of time blocking or cleaning up after SEO spam.

Please, don't spam wikis. The SandBox page is there for a purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is not meant to be "a place where anyone can create backlinks."

[Garrett]

mbrubeck - thank you for sharing how Wiki Spam affects wiki owners. I hope it convinces everyone not to try this "technique."

G

[Dave Hawley]

Garret, most of your posts are now likley to cause grief to anyone that follows them. These post, IMO, are lowering the standard of WPW.

Why not post some quality properly researched stuff as apposed to spamming techniques?

[G[dot]com]

Same old story, isn´t it?

ABUSE...it is always ABUSE

What is the difference between Wiki Spam and this?

June 14, 2004

SEO Chat Institutes Sandbox Affect for New Members
As SEO Chat's Forum continues to grow, we continue to have problems with people spamming the forum in order to increase their link popularity. SEO Chat, like many other forums, allow signature links. However, SEO Chat has a fairly attractive PageRank value, which tends to attract link seekers. A forum for SEOs by SEOs with high PR is not always a good match. Since SEO Chat's PageRank rose, link enthusiasts have come by and posted hundreds of "Thank you, great post" with links to their sites. Deleting, pruning and banning those members takes too much time. So we decided to institute some policy.

First policy was not to allow members with less then 100 posts to show their signature file. After that was set into play, we saw two things. (1) Manual signature links embedded within the body of a post. (2) People posting a hundred times in one day in order to reach the 100 post requirement. If those 100 posts were of value, no one would care but of course they were not.

So we added a second policy. Why not name it, the SEO Chat Sandbox. We require 100 posts PLUS a member has to be on board for 90 days. The 90 days are symbolic of the average time it takes for a site that has been sandboxed by Google to come out of the sandbox. I hope this works.

Posted by rustybrick at June 14, 2004 08

Taken from: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000555.html

No difference.

Daddy always say: When people don´t have values and principles, try to make them understand about honesty and respect this way: Tell them that it takes the same amount of time and energy -maybe more- doing things wrong or deceptively than achieving them decently and doing no harm.

And Philipp says:

"If I would have a commercial business, I would not put backlinks in Wiki Sandboxes. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a very serious business strategy." -

Maybe we should have to adopt this way of looking at decency in terms of efficiency to convince people to do good...

[G[dot]com]

Garret, most of your posts are now likley to cause grief to anyone that follows them. These post, IMO, are lowering the standard of WPW.

Why not post some quality properly researched stuff as apposed to spamming techniques?

Let me see...this thread is called Search Engine insider REPORTS. Which means that some person or group will make reports here about a certain subject. Those people are called "Reporters".

So here we have one Reporter, Garrett, and one main subject, Search Engines.

My beloved Webster´s Dictionary (i still like the paper edition) says:

Reporter: a person who gathers information and writes reports for publication in a newspaper, magazine, etc.

If Wiki or Forum Spam is what is going on in the search engine world Garrett make the research and HAS to report it.

You can´t blame or criticize CNN because of the war in Middle East. They just report it. And if you want to learn, you watch Discovery or The History Channel. :o)

Likewise, other threads in this same forum function specifically to give advise on how to do good SEO and decent SEO. This is not the place....I think.

G

[Dave Hawley]

You can´t blame or criticize CNN because of the war in Middle East. They just report it. And if you want to learn, you watch Discovery or The History Channel. :o)

There is resposible reporting and non-resposible reporting. If Garret just reports how to hack into your web site, or how to crash your server etc I bet you would see this differently.

Garret is not doing himself or WPW any favors with this type of "reporting". See here also;
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...=114815#114815

[G[dot]com]

There is resposible reporting and non-resposible reporting. If Garret just reports how to hack into your web site, or how to crash your server etc I bet you would see this differently.

Again...he who reports doesn´t report *how* to do things. He does not teach.

And thinking that it could bother me Garrett´s performance just if it was *me* the one touched and not another person...well certainly you don´t know me at all.

Hello, my name is Gisela. And I am not that way :o)

Nevermind.

Good evening in Australia, Dave!

G

[kokopoko]

Is completely rational. Spending valuable time horsing about in wiki sandboxes installing links that any wiki owner will have automatically deleted every few hours anyway, is not a serious strategy.

After reading Philipp's blog I spammed a few and did notice the links got deleted within minutes. But, days later I noticed Google found my spam links not in the current Wiki sandbox state but in the list of revised sandbox revisions that each sandbox seems to keep. All were PR4 and above. So perhaps the Wiki sandbox links can be permanent.