Brandnew Spam Policy for AllTheWeb.com

next round: webmaster vs webmaster!

[heini]

Did you know about Page Spam and Spam Stuffing? No? Well the first "is entire documents consisting of Spam", while the latter "is material inside otherwise good documents, but which is not meant to be read by people"

Spam Policy for AllTheWeb.com [alltheweb.com] dated 2002-01-07 enlightens us on the subject of spam and how Fast intends to adress this issue.

They threaten err promise to either reduce ranking or exclude spammers from the index.

Oh ya, of course we are invited to report it (=spam) by sending an e-mail entitled "Spam Report" to [e-mail]

Really interesting in this document anyhow is the phrase: computing static rank. Not page rank, but close...

[WebGuerrilla]

They might want to take a shot at rewriting that. I read it twice and I'm still not sure what it says. :)

[tedster]

The issue for me has always been: can some form of spam be eliminated without taking a lot of "civilian casualties".

I don't expect any SE is going to talk about that openly -- it would just be giving aid to the enemy. So the proof will be in the relevance of the SERP. I've got my Opera "Super Search" set for AllTheWeb side-by-side with Google. To my view, Google is winning.

[Air]

FAST's policy, so as far as we are able, is to:

Sounds more like an apology than a Spam Policy.

> I read it twice and I'm still not sure what it says.
lol ...same here. Reworking that explanation would be a good idea IMO.

[Liane]

In all sincerity, I got the impression that English was not the firt language of whomever wrote that policy.

Either English is a second language or ambiguity was what they were shooting for! If ambiguity was the intent. They accomplished what they set out to do.

A career in politics would not be out of the question!:)

[william_dw]

Hiya,
Alltheweb are norwegian,
So it was probably a norwegian, but you've gotta give her/him kudos for effort, writing spam policys in one's second language isnt exactly possible with altavista translation.

Although on reading it, i almost wonder...

[heini]

>English was not the firt language of whomever wrote that policy

While that may be true I don't think it's the point here. Fast got offices in the US and a subsidaryin the UK, WmW member Stephen Baker as well as Alltheweb's Press staff are native English speakers.

The explanation given here are not aimed at SEO pros. This policy is something that tries to accomplish two goals: Give the press some fodder, cover the bases and try to scare the amateur web marketeers.

It's not by accident that Fast put this document up at a time where Google adresses this issue publicly.