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I came across a website ranked #1 and I noticed that it has hundreds of incoming links coming from guestbooks. In fact, it looks like each guestbook entry is identical as if the posts were automated. My question is: wouldn't Google frown upon this? Does Google detect this sort of thing? Would Google punish the website for this?
Thanks,
Mark
You have a point stever, but is there any way out?
shaadi, a bot is a computer program that automatically does a task. I could fairly quickly noodle together a bot that could seek out guestbooks, and when it found them add any URL I wanted to the guestbooks it finds. This is the same as how e-mail spammers work. They scour the Net looking for thousands of e-mail addresses, and then spams every one of them. The guestbook spammers that I was referring to in this thread here I started clearly are using bots to do it.
>Also the biggest negative of signing a guest book it that it cannot be reversed, you cannot some how remove the links from the guest book and its for the whole world to see what you have done & for the one’s who can understand why its done can – it’s a subject to report in forums/ Spam report etc.
I could just as easily have my bot sign your site's URL, or any site I want for any reason, or no reason at all, to a thousand guestbooks. The idea being to get you kicked out of Google. Those of us in the e-mail spam fighting game even have a special term for this: doing a "Joe Job" on someone. This involves scraping websites, Usenet, etc. for thousands of e-mail addresses, have it send e-mail spam to every one that looks like an ad for a competitor, enemy, etc. Then, you complain to their site host, the host's upstreams, etc. about them spamming to try to get their account canned. Some sysadmins have been tricked into canning accounts after a Joe Job. I have little doubt right now people are spamming their competetion's URL to guestbooks and complaining to Google about it. Googleguy already has posted that because of this, Google doesn't ban sites for guestbook links. I hope he is telling the truth. If not, this sort of sabotaging the competition with guestbook signing bots will get out of hand.
Now, I don't think there should be a PENALTY for these links, just that they shouldn't be counted. Guestbooks are a legitimate way for surfers to find related sites, but at the moment many Guestbooks are stuffed full of spam.. it would do both Google and Guestbookphiles (there's a new word I've invented) a favour.
I'm sure this process can be automated, but there is a fundamental problem here - Google has the most scrutinised and best understood engine out there. Spam is always going to be a moving target, but this sort of thing isn't exactly rocket science if you have an understanding of how PageRank works.
What's the solution? Well, I guess it's to spend more resources on fighting spam (which is going to involve a lot of human time) and a published position on Guestbooks to the effect that you should not try to boost your SERPs by signing them and that you may be penalised. Individual Guestbooks could also be dropped to a lower PR, such as PR1. This would probably be a manual process.. but then, how many high PR guestbooks are there out there?
And, how pray tell is Google supposed to determine who signed the guestbooks to consider penalizing for this? Anyone can sign any URL to a slew of guestbooks for any reason, or no way at all. I just checked, and Google is still running than damn Adword by a guestbook spamming service that promises to spam 10,000 guestbooks with the URL of your choice for $9.95. And, I did report this sleazeball spammer to Google 10 days ago. Other than a quick form letter e-mail back, that Adword is still running. I am quite shocked, and disappointed, that Google has gone over to the dark side and has decided to profit from guestbook spamming. :(
a) GoogleGuy is just saying this too save face
b) He truly thinks the filter is working and is unaware
If google was small company I would report their hosting about the fact that they advertise company, who spam the net and that they don't take any actions on my request to remove it. Imaging google is removed from the net for spam LOL.
A dull job for someone to do, though. Maybe GoogleGuy has a trainee who could do it ;)
Whatever's GoogleGuy's intention, it doesn't change the facts.
- there's currently NO algo active to detect and fight guestbook spam or even crosslinking, 1x1 image links and other dodgy stuff (even with large site clusters of pure spam).
- they DO manually check and remove / penalize pages that are reported to them via spam report form and that seriously cheat the system!
So, no matter, what's the intention of googleguy, report spam using google's report form and don't speculate about gg's motives. I don't like conspiracy theories or speculations soo much - they are more a waste of energy than helpfull. They wouldn't change things at google at all since google is owned and operated by aliens. Believe me!
The above statement is not meant to be a complain about Spam!
but then, how many high PR guestbooks are there out there?
On my last count there were more than 100k guestbooks with PR4 and above. Just search hard and it is not impossible to find a few dozen PR6 guestbooks then there are a few PR7 guestbooks also (and no, I'm not drunk right now).
Again we already learned the hard way back in september/october of last year not to put all your eggs in one basket :) (I highly recommend others to do so now even if you do have a good spot) You will have a more successful website and peace of mind knowing it.
I have little to gain, but its just depressing to see others gain so much, in so little time (couple of months)...
Its Much more sinister then hidden links, and all the "other tricks", that webmasters come up with.. and the sad part is at this point IT WORKS VERY WELL! Im 100% SURE!
Basically you have some unscrupulous types FORCING thousands of ads/spams onto unsuspecting guestbook/home page operators. Who typically are just common folk putting up a personal webpage, or a hobby site and in the process of putting up their page, putting their heart and soul into its uptake and content.
So now they are being forced fed with hundreds & thousands of spam ads degrading their own sites all "For the sake of a better google listing". You can tell they are doing it only for google listings because of the many guestbooks spammed, because of the way they are phrasing the spams and links with specific keywords.
Joeshmoe webmaster the competitor of site x sees the effectiveness of guestbook spamming, and says hey why not i give it a try too, To the point where their guestbooks/dreambooks is no longer usable and needs to be shutdown.
Does anyone agree that this is just going to far forcing hundreds of spam links upon someone who doesnt want them, and are many times "Very Inappropriate" in nature to the nature of the guestbook itself.
It really has to stop, I Hope google will do something about Serious about it! Personally I feel guestbook spammers should be penalized or kicked off competely! They know what they were doing. And why they were doing it.
Going to the point of degrading other personal homepage sites for your own google listings is just kinda disturbing in general and degrades the internet spirit as a whole.
>So, no matter, what's the intention of googleguy, report spam using google's report form and don't speculate about gg's motives. I don't like conspiracy theories or speculations soo much - they are more a waste of energy than helpfull.
The problem being that when it comes to guestbook spam they can't do this. Unless Googleguy is lying, and Google itself is totally incompetent. Otherwise, you could pay $10 to that guestbook spamming company that Google makes money selling Adwords to spam your competion's URL to 10,000 guestbooks, and then report your competitor to Google and get them banned. Guestbooks are a great example of something that needs to be handled by algo filters. Google just hasn't figured out yet how to filter this.
- report disturbing results to google [google.com]
- or email the guestbook owner and tell them about the problem (they mostly don't know about it at all)
- or email the guestbook provider (they're often big providers with thousands of hosted gb's or popular sample scripts) and force them to either disallow crawling their site (through robots.txt) or to include the robots meta tag noindex, nofollow into their guestbooks by default (great idea, Iguana - allthough this takes a lot of time until all major "se friendly" guestbooks are disallowed).
- wait until google invents more effective filters, one day, to solve this problem.
What they are doing about it at the moment includes selling Adwords to a guestbook spamming company.
>Personally I feel guestbook spammers should be penalized or kicked off competely! They know what they were doing. And why they were doing it.
So, you are suggesting that Google ban google.com from appearing in their own index for profiting from, and overtly encouraging, guestbook spamming? As for kicking off sites with guestbook links, competitors would love the idea that they could pay $10 to that Google Adwords spammer to sign their competiton's URL to 10,000 guestbooks for $10 to get them kicked out of Google. This would be the best $10 investment they ever made.
rfgdxm1, just a friendly reminder: repetition doesn't solve the problem and beware of a duplicate statement penalty. ;)
>Guestbooks are a great example of something that needs to be handled by algo filters. Google just hasn't figured out yet how to filter this.
Currently it seems so. But i didn't hear GG saying that all filters are activated, yet.
ROFL. I guess I think in the same terms as keywords on a web page. If you want to get anywhere with search engines, you need adequate repetition on page. ;)
What they are doing about it at the moment includes selling Adwords to a guestbook spamming company.
Like all media organizations--and yes, it is a media organization)--Google separates editorial (search) from ad sales. The left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing, and that isn't just accidental--it's by design. (It's also why you may see an exposé of weight-loss clinics and ads for weight-loss clinics in the same newspaper, or a TV news report on SUV rollovers that's followed by a 30-second spot for an SUV.)
So yes, it's annoying to see a Google AdWord for guestbook-spamming software. However, this shouldn't be interpreted to mean that Google's engineers and programmers are ignoring guestbook spam. It just means the people who sell AdWords need to be more vigilant in blocking scummy ads.
If You are Website Owner with a guestbook you have to clean it sometimes. Otherwise your PageRank goes to south.
Faktor 2
All "detected" incoming links from Guestbooks counted 0. No Penalty, no relevance.
Faktor 3
A website with only incoming Guestbook Links must set automaticly on Zero.
Faktor 4
ASP and Internet Provider must protect their guestbooks for their clients against bots. If they do nothing against bot spamming, their main site gets a penalty.
Faktor 5
If Guestbook Code is used on a website without bot Protection the website owner gets a penalty. If he coded a guestbook he can code a protection to.
Faktor 6
constructive Brainstorming
Its Your Part.....
patrol
Look at the message not on spelling:-)
My question is then why haven't the people who sell Adword's yanked this? It has been 10 days since I informed Google about this, and got a response. I can easily see how some Adword salesperson might not have realized when they sold this exactly what the company was about. However, a quick surf on over to the site would verify that this is nothing but a scummy spamming service. I can only conclude the Adword sales department at Google is at best incompetent, and at worst sleazy, that they would continue to sell Adwords to spammers.
This would end up killing a LOT of sites. And, I've seen .edu and other quite respectable sites with heavily spammed guestbooks. My guess as to what happens in reality is that their website designer tells them it is a good idea to have a guestbook. They just say "sure, why not." And, then promptly forget it is even there. Or, if they know its there the site owner at this point doesn't even know how to clean it up. Also, how would the average guestbook owner know the guestbook has to much links to sites with to much incoming guestbook links? How many people even know about the Google link: command? This would be penalizing innocent sites for the actions of spammers.
>ASP and Internet Provider must protect their guestbooks for their clients against bots. If they do nothing against bot spamming, their main site gets a penalty.
Impossible. This would require that the ISP know the IPs of guestbook signing bots. And, the people running guestbook signing bots likely often are using proxies.
>If Guestbook Code is used on a website without bot Protection the website owner gets a penalty. If he coded a guestbook he can code a protection to.
Again, impossible. To start, almost all guestbooks run off the shelf code. And, if the person ran their own code, they could only block bots that repeatedly signed the guestbook over and over. If somedomain.com is running a guestbook spamming bot, the bot will be programmed to spam thousands of guestbooks one time each. Thus, each site with a guestbook will only see the IP of that guestbook signing bot once. There is no way of knowing if the signer is a bot or a human.
Yeah, we know. I think you have posted the same thing a half dozen times in the last 2 days alone.
No offence, but it is difficult enough to wade through any Google thread these days looking for useful information without having to read the same thing over and over.
Peter
While I can see the appeal of the idea "Heh, let these foolish spammers waste their time uselessly spamming guestbooks. Better they do that then do something that actually could improve their Google rankings." However, look at this from the point of view of people with guestbooks on their site? From a public relations perspective, I dunno if it is good for Google to have a lot of website owners thinking "thanks to Google, they destroyed my little guestbook. :( "
Addition:
Google ownes this data. They know it because this data is in their algo.
A guestbook with 100 outgoing links has sometimes >50-99% links to guestbook spammer sites.
On the guestbook spammer site the incoming links are often >95-100% from Guestbooks.
Google knows from all links were they come from and were they go to. If they install counters with %Filters set on guestbook links, the heavy guestbook spammers must come up.
Otherwise make a search in ... in Germany as example I know a keyword with 5-8€ per Click. All Sites on the first 20 Places are guestbook spammers.
The hammer is, sometimes you get by specific search some heavily spammed guestbooks on the first places.
My input: I don't think guestbooks are a real problem and I don't think it matters that much in the scheme of things. If I were Google, I'd put it pretty low on the list of required fixes. Only webmasters notice where links are coming from and the percentage of sites on the web that sign mass guestbooks is infinitesimal. There may be a little link pop benefit but I don't think you can make it to the top on guestbook links alone and without proper, relevant content that Google likes.
Off topic: rfgdxm1, why the '1' at the end of your name? Could it be that rfgdxm was already taken?
As for the "rfgdxm1", long ago I registered here as "rfgdxm" and forgot the password. I just reregistered months later as "rfgdxm1" to get around this, and am now stuck with it. ;)
I would be *really* careful about using the guest book bombing site for three reasons;
1) If they use such methods, they are from what camp and then get your credit card info.
2) There is absolutely nothing to say where those guest books are, or what it will do for you. They also bomb ffa link pages. Work it out.
3) They even caution you about using the site!
