Some more reporting on Google's March patent on search technology in Great Site Ranking in Google The Secrets Out. Not really new, but if your a spammer and to stupid to understand what is said in the patent this will give you a good summary. An even better one is: spamming will hurt you in Google. – Joe - 2005-06-16 21:53 UTC
I thinks it's missleading to suggest that a website owner might suffer "months of misery as thier site gets banned and 'Sand boxed'" if they make mistakes in their SEO activity. If google were to implement a rank dropping machanism with teeth, then the black hats would switch tactics, and start doing bad linking to their competitor's websites. This is the problem which google faces, and this is why they are not about to make any sweeping changes. It's still only a patent. Doesn't mean google will actually use this stuff to a noticeable extent. I reckon they will introduce some spam detection improvements very gradually, under a shroud of secrecy. But whether it will be enough to make a difference, ramains to be seen. – Halz - 2005-06-17 11:41 UTC
I don't think Google is going to catch you for a few mistakes in SEO activity. There is a big difference between some minor SEO mistakes and using lots of spammy techniques. If you accidently spammed thousands of websites because you didn't know it was wrong it's still spam and Google should punish you for it. That months of misery is not misleading, once sites get banned it's hard to get them reindexed even once they clean up their act. I don't think Google are using all the stuff in the patent right now, they are likely building up and testing each antispam feature one at a time so they don't get innocent sites. Google supposedly does a lot of its live testing and implementing new features during the summer, so hopefully we will seeing most of this stuff come online soon. It should make a noticable difference in the end if they put enough weight on these detection techniques. They must eventually do it and more, the spam problem is only getting worse. Anything they do will be worked around by spammers, but eventually spam will be so ineffective for Google listings that search results will improve and maybe web spam will stop or at least slow down. – Joe - 2005-06-17 14:34 UTC
I just found some interesting referrers to pages on this wiki: Someone from Canada searched Google for "auto post on wiki sand box". Somebody from the Philippines searched for "open source code word salad spam" and then tried "spam open code word salad". I also thought that ""back to the future" doesn't make any sense" was interesting, or at least funny. Also very funny: "dealing with assholes, help me". This one got him Halz user page and there's probably a tragedy behind that referrer. The absolute number one on our list of referrers from people searching for porn is JoesTempSpamHolder3. And, finally, we are number two on Japan's yahoo when you search for "introduce something about japan", although I'm not quite sure why you'd want to do that. – Manni - 2005-06-10 07:49
I noticed the popularity of JoesTempSpamHolder3 yesterday. That is why I updated JoesTempSpamHolder5. I don't know why 3 is so much more popular than the rest, but hopefully I can improve 5's idiot attracting ability. I skipped the search engine referrers so I didn't notice that stuff. For my blog I have recently been getting an unusual amount of hits on "congratulations your a nigger." I don't know why so many different people are comming up with that same terminology, it seems weird to me. Also popular is "cutting wrists" and "emo." All products of those wonderful LWS looers. – Joe - 2005-06-10 07:52 UTC
I hope Joe and Manni don't mind me borrowing their soapbox, but for those interested, the WikiMinion anti-wikispam bot will be offline from 04:00 UTC Thursday, June 9th to 17:00 UTC Saturday, June 11th. When WikiMinion comes back online it will remove any spam inserted while it was down that wasn't cleaned manually. – RichardP - 2005-06-09 03:59 UTC
Can't tell if its the GooglePray moron, but some spammer is using our text at least up to May 28. Searching Google for the term "chongqed.org" jumped from 6,560 results to 29,900 since May 10. Some are legitimate I am sure, but it seems like he really did a good job spreading around our url. – Joe - 2005-06-07 02:22 UTC