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Cloaking via http 'Referer' header (snip)
- Requesting a page without Referer header (e.g. like GoogleBot does) produces a Spam page
- Requesting with Referer header (e.g. link was clicked from Google search results) produces a redirect to a affiliate site, so also doorwaying.
GoogleBot could request once with Referer and once without Referer (and act on substantial differences) or always set a random Referer. Does anyone know of a legitimate use of above technique?
This is an example of spamming by a German company, also a type of cloaking in that the pages the user and googlebot see are very different. Through the following css statement most of the page is rendered outside of the browsers window so the user cannot see it:
h2 {position: absolute; width:800px; left: -220px; top: -100px;}
I'm not quite sure if GoogleBot crawls css, but if it did, it could check that at least 22000 pixels of h2 are offscreen (and of course the tags you don't see are full of keywords and links to other spam). Does anyone know of a legitimate use of this technique?
If there is no known legitimate use of of these techniques I think Google could really reduce the amount of spam in its index.
Eddy4711
[edited by: Marcia at 9:34 pm (utc) on Mar. 31, 2003]
[edit reason] No pointing out specifics, please [/edit]
This is a joke right? I mean - how can someone control all affiliates from spamming? I don't see how you could do this...
So because of one (well 3) idiot spammers all of my hard work on my site gets banned because others can't play by the rules?
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean..?
Spammers tend to increase Adword sales by the honest companies that need them to compete.
If a site gets more than 3 occurances of affiliates that pull this stunt - then the 'affiliate partner' should also get his site banned
[edited by: oLeon at 6:59 am (utc) on April 10, 2003]
No - I did not mean this as a joke.
If you can set up a system to track the referrals from your affiliates; and you know the sites/ pages/ URLS that your affiliates refer visitors from, and you have terms and conditions relating to your affiliate program; and you can work out who to pay and how much to pay them and then actually pay them - then stopping affiliates from acting in the way I described would be a pretty minor additional activity.
Of course - many of those that practice the methods I described aren't actually 'affiliates' at all - they are the "benefitting site" themselves (ie the site which ultimately gets the traffic) - hiding behind a throwaway spam domain - to enable them to spam and get off scott free. Hence the point of this post.
Ibasq - if you don't see how you could detect this - then I'd suggest that you probably haven't had a lot of experience with affiliate partners - because this is no different to many of the other aspects of 'affiliate partner management' - most of which involves use of logfiles, IP Address blocks, the googletoolbar and whois.
Of course - the other way is - don't do any checking and just get a larger chequebook.
: )
Chris
Next thing we know we'll be throwing aroudn huge numbers of "lost business" to spammers like the do regarding disasters or piracy... hmm... "Billions of $$$ lost to SE spammers selling viagra and mortages..." I can already see the headlines...
That is understandable - but these spammers obviously have enough time on their hands to come up with a solution to get around this don't you think?
You are right tho - I don't have a whole lot of affiliate experience - so I guess I should stay out of it - but it just seems like there could be a better way to deal with the spammers...
Take care;)
I have been turning spam reports in on these guys for a while now. I also included all of the items GG asked for. I'm glad you are being heard.
This really begs the question: Why, when I've turned in exactly this type of test case two month's ago, was this not acted upon? Does this type of spam need to aired here for resolution?
I understand that Google wants to automate this process and have tried to help by giving them the exact information they ask for. However, it does not work unless you sepcifically get GG's attention here. Which seems to be a hit or miss proposition.
Here was my post: [webmasterworld.com...]
The company in question absolutely dominates the market they spam in, and have for a while.
Add to that the spam and quality reports..
I guess they are building a new algo on how to retrieve real feedback info from all these emails. WebmasterWorld members can sometimes be lucky on the direct feedback - a beautiful unequal world.
It is not fair, and it will not happen, because Google can not know for certain that the sites really are affiliates, or if they are competitors acting like spamming affiliates to get the main site banned.
If it's simply a matter of human resources, I'm sure that group of volunteers could be found to help. Like I said, there would need to be checks and balances so that sites were not banned unfairly. It could work.
conventional software testing uses requirements from which to generate testcases. isn't the use of results as a testcase a little back-to-front?
a better way to inject quality into google is to specify the anti-spam requirements very tightly. from a good spec. you get good testing.
i'm sure that the good people here could produce a great draft anti-spam spec which you could no doubt develop into a fantastic one! then you can get your q.a. guys to get creative and generate a top notch set of test cases!
Ibasq - if you don't see how you could detect this - then I'd suggest that you probably haven't had a lot of experience with affiliate partners - because this is no different to many of the other aspects of 'affiliate partner management' - most of which involves use of logfiles, IP Address blocks, the googletoolbar and whois.
Chris_D: disagreed.
what about people sending traffic to your url from spamy sites who are not your affiliates but competitors who just want to nuke you?
I can't believe people making suggestions like this in times this happens:
[webmasterworld.com...]
conventional software testing uses requirements from which to generate testcases. isn't the use of results as a testcase a little back-to-front?
ROTFLMAO!
That sure sounds like something from a management handbook or something that ISO would come up with.
What you are suggesting is to ignore real life problems and pay attention to something that someone imagines!
But that is about the point, he is referring to coding new features and having some examples to code to. Test cases is not referring to QA testing, but to programmer testing against a real data set.
For example look at the Zeus and links2you link farm tools. Most Zeus sites have either a themeindex.html on the site or a link to the Zeus site.
All incoming links to links2you sites are from pages like shopping06.html or shopping03.html or similar.
IMO it would be a piece of cake to have an automated system to deal with these sites but they are still very commonplace, especially Zeus. Do a search on themeindex and you get back 36,000 results.
GG are these two methods of spam worthy of action by google? If not I want to start using them if I know that no action will be taken against me.
i presume from your response that you consider w3 html validation a waste of time. validating your html is a classic example of testing that software conforms to requirements.
I think vincevincevince is right - the 'democracy of the web' cuts both ways. Ever check your PR? Ever look at your backwards links? Ever check your logfiles? Of course you'd see this 'spammy pseudo affiliate' giving you referral traffic'!
Yes BigDave/Bernie - you could set up a spammy site - and direct the traffic to your competitor - in an 'attempt' to get him banned. But I'd suggest that some of the cloaked 700 page sites I've seen probably aren't competitors 'helping' drive traffic to a competitor's site to get them banned. And - as c1bernaught and vincevincevince implied - you'd notice the traffic and see what was happening yourself - and if you chose to ignore it (3 TIMES) - you probably deserve to get banned.
Would the link look like your other real affiliate links if you were a competitor? If you checked your own logfiles - would you notice the 'competitor' traffic?. Could you report the spammer yourself - if the fear was you'd get caught - the same way you'd react to a pagejacker today?
Let me make my (obviously pretty subtle) point a little more directly. I'll reword this to:
How could you work out whether the 'beneficiary of the traffic' from the spammy redirection site was involved in the scam - or innocent?
Well - I'd start with a few simple automated tests:
1. The vast majority (95%) of spammy cloaked redirector sites I've found have either:
- fake whois information attached to the spammy domain; or
- the 'beneficial recipient of the traffic's name listed as the domain owner (er duh!); or
- a known 'advertising/spam agency's name' listed as the owner of the spam domain.
(1st clue) on how to dish out the penalty to the recipient domain - is his name on the spammy domain?
2. Look at the IP address. Are the spammy domain and the 'beneficial recipient of the traffic' residing on the same IP - or 'real close'?
3. are the host headers actually bound to the site URL - ie its the same server/ same site/ different URL? That sort of means that the recipient is involved...
Believe me - for 95% of cases - there is 100% accuracy in knowing whether the 'beneficial recipient of the traffic' is a knowing participant in the scam. And the other 5% shouldn't get more than 3 chances.... More people are greedy than maliciously vindictive.....
Well, here is the code causing me to lose money every month.
I've turned in spam reports. I followed GG's advice and used my nickname, Googleguy and WebmasterWorld. I've sacriced small woodland creatures, joined the ranks of magic delvers, pounded my fists, etc....
Now I'll try this:
Anybody recognize this code? Someone in your market using it to beat the snot out of you? Have you followed the rules, built content, built good links, have easy navigation and all failed to beat the guy using this code?
w = 1024;
hi = 4000;
document.write("<NOLAYER><IFRAME SRC=http://www.example.com" + " width=" + w + " height=" + hi + " scrolling=no marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 frameborder=0>");
document.write("</IFRAME></NOLAYER>");
Let me know, perhaps an avalanche of similiar spam reports will get somebody's attention.
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 1:40 am (utc) on April 12, 2003]
Looks like they don't have any intention of doing anything about it as long as the user gets what they search for.
So, do you join them or hold out another month just to be disappointed?
Of course, I'll eat my words if this is just a joke their playing on us since they didn't pull an April fools joke and when the dance comes to an end, all will be good in Google land!
We can hope can't we!
Sound like it's ok to spam. The caveat being that the results have to be relevent.
Tedster, in another thread, really lays it out well.
I used to think we had to cheat to compete. Now I realize it was never considered cheating.
It's SEO up to the point you get banned. Then it's spam.
(1) I stand by my posting the other day. We all complain that we have entered spam reports and that nothing has happened but I'll bet you anything that spammers enter many 1000s of legitimate sites as spam sites to slow down the manual work at Google et al. Can you imagine how much of a backlog there could be there?
(2) No. There are no sure ways of determining spam. Who determines how many links from one site to another are spam? Who determines whether a CSS is bad?
As i mentioned the other day the only true way to do this would be to some how render exactly what the user sees on the browser and then index that. Very, very hard. Very very computing time intensive. How long do you want to wait between updates?
I'm no spammer. I suffer at the hands of these people too. However, the reality is none of us pay Google except via the advertising. If we advertise then we are entitled to help and assists, and (my experience) you do get really good support.
We all talk as if Google owes it to us to get rid of spam and to improve the quality of their product. Wrong. They owe it to themselves, but in the great scheme of things all of the search engines have the same issues. Now if someone were to come along and make a quantum leap in cleaning up search results etc then Google and others would be forced to respond. Until the market demands that of them I believe we'll continue to be faced with the current situation.
Unfortunatly, Very well stated!
IMHO you need an 'accessory before the fact' penalty as well. If a site gets more than 3 occurances of affiliates that pull this stunt - then the 'affiliate partner' should also get his site banned. But first - you need to ban the affiliate spammers.
That type of solution would be a crackhead's dream come true. Banning the destination site only makes that particular company more dependent on their affiliate network for search engine traffic. That inturn creates more affiliate spam, not less.
The best thing Google could do to eliminate affiliate spam is to boost the rankings of the sites that have aggressive affiliates, not penalize them.
The bottom line is, many humans out there submit spam reports every day and they for the most part go un-noticed.
The toolbar has the smiley faces.... If google just got people to click on "frowning" smiley face every time they thought the site misrepresented the SERP it's supposed to be for, factored that in with spam reports and unsatisfied SERP reports, and how many unique users these reports are from, etc.... they could conduct statistical analysises and determine to some degree of probabililty that this page is spam or not.
They can then do their "rigourous spam filtering" with AI, rendering, you name it and go nuts on the page to determine if it's really spam or not, like the equivalent of a full rectal examination :)
But to do that on every single page indexed would be a waste of resources for nothing if you ask me.
And as they ban more and more of these sites, the load of sites to check will be easier and easier to handle.
I must disagree on a couple of points.
1. Google has said many times that they want to automate this process. Yet they have no real convention for setting it up.
2. I think that there is a LOT of spam that could easily be filtered. I don't get the feeling that Google cares a whole lot.
For some reason people believe that mentioning spam means your whining. Guess what... there are many people who are very confused as to what spam is and simply want to know. When they see what they think spam is spam they say something. Bam! They get treated like lepers. I thought we were trying to learn from each other and improve.
Also, as far as I can tell no one here "suffers at the hands of spammers". To say something like that means you really are ignorant of SEO. Sucks right?
Because I have other files and subdirectories in that same directory that I don't want or need spidered. XML feed, scripts, fonts, etc. don't need to be crawled.
