As Dave Sifry notes, there's going to be a Web Spam Squashing Summit next week: Thursday, Feb 24th.
Technorati is organizing the event (thanks guys!) and we're hosting it on-site at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. The main goal to get the tool makers in a room together to talk about web spam, share info, and brainstorm.
So far AOL, Google, MSG, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo are on board. I hope we'll also have representation from Feedster, WordPress (hi Matt), and Ask Jeeves and/or Bloglines too.
As Dave says, space is limited, so send a note to rsvp@technorati.com if you're interested.
Sadly, I won't be there the whole day. I'm on a lunchtime panel in San Francisco (more on that later) so I'll be around for the beginning and end, but not the middle. But our best spam fighters will be on hand. :-)
And just to be absolutely clear, this is a technical working session, not a media event. You can expect to see some of the attendees blog about the day, of course.
Posted by jzawodn at February 18, 2005 12:06 AM
I replied as soon as I got the email from Niall yesterday, looking forward to seeing everyone there.
UserLand is hoping to be there--resources are stretched a bit thin pending a software release. Thanks for the heads-up...
Steve Kirks
Product Manager
UserLand Softwarer
Feedster, Ask Jeeves, Bloglines, and Userland all received invitations to the event yesterday, among many other key players from the world of publishing and indexing web content. We put together an initial list and will work on keeping the signal-to-noise ratio strong as we work on technical solutions.
Jake Savin, Userland's Lead Developer, received an invitation yesterday afternoon/early evening.
The easiest way to find "high quality" or spammable blogs with high PageRank is to use a PR search tool like the one at www.seochat.com.
The most prolific blog spammers tend to post links to gambling, drugs, and hotel/vacation strawman websites or throwaway websites. .RU and .RO and free web page hosts are prominent. The spammers are assuming that the sites will eventually be banned, so they are used to collect PR and then pass the PR to real websites. It seems to take about four to six months for this two-stage PR transfer process to occur.
The use of software driven redirected links in MovableType blogs is effective against those web spammers trying to collect PR, as I have not seen much spam on those blogs recently.
Wikipedia has also implemented rel="nofollow", however, Yahoo! has not implemented it, yet. A link check in Yahoo! shows that Yahoo! recognizes the link from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing to my Articles page. Today, Yahoo!'s cache of the linked page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
shows that the rel="nofollow" attribute is in the link, meaning that Yahoo! has not begun weeding out these nofollow links.
Some savvy owners of Wordpress blogs have recently updated their blogware to include the nofollow attribute, but there are many webmasters that lack the time or know-how to update their blog software or add plugins. http://noahgrey.com/greysoft/features.shtml is another popular blog program that is targeted by spammers. See PR 3 page - http://www.torpedo.levillage.org/b2commentspopup.php?p=710&c=1.
Blogs are often forgotten or blog owners don’t have the time to clean inappropriate comments. The spam links left on these sites are going to be difficult for search engines to deal with. For these type of sites with gross spamming, I recommend that search engines use a filter that catches high occurrences of multiple outbound links (4 or more?) to http://xxxx.domain.tld and high occurrences of the same keywords that exist inside URLs like http://cheap-v-iagra.freepages.net on the same page. Since many blogs and guestbooks don’t allow HTML anchor tags, but do allow just URLs and convert them to anchor tags, the preferred URL structure for spammers looks like http://keyword-keyword2-keyword3.freehost.net.
Just my two bits on the spam problem to take with you to the conference. Good luck.
Jeremy,
Andy Newton and myself have written a draft on distributed blacklists for spam control:
http://hxr.us/~anewton/draft-newton-shafranovich-distributed-blacklists-00.html
Is there a way to present or writeup something at the summit via phone or skype?
I haven't been able to locate any followup articles on the summit, was anything accomplished?
BTW, I have to laugh about Dave Sifry's announcement via his blog. He's running MT 2.65 with no comment-spam protection, the announcement's comments are infested with dozens of porn and drug spams. You're either part of the solution, or part of the problem.
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