Saturday, June 05, 2004

Search engine spamming competition

Anil Dash has entered a search engine spamming competition, and he asks his readers to link to a page on his blog using a unique nonsense phrase created by the competition organizers.

My hunch is that taking part in the competition isn't a particularly good idea, since it should be fairly easy for a search engine that detects the phrase to automatically poison future results from that site, and all the sites that link to it, by assuming that they are link spammers. After all, the sites that use the phrase in question are clearly identifying themselves as would-be result manipulators, with no possibility that they are accidentally linking using the phrase in question.

While I doubt it's a diabolical plot to get link spammers, search engine optimizers and Googlebombers to expose themselves, I'm not going to participate anyway, but if you want to find out more see: [www.dashes.com/anil/2004/06/04/nigritude_ultra] .

[See also Google's spam result reporting page]