'spamfighting' Category

• Google. Foot. Gun. Shoot.

  The AdWords Help Forum has degenerated over the last year or so, into a customer service forum. I intend to cover that in detail some other time. The common signatures of pain in the forum are: Complaints that “Google won’t accept my Credit Card“ Making promo vouchers work Suspension for various reasons, often involving guaranteed [...]

  February 4th, 2010

• Search Engine Optimisers, Spam and Reputation Management

  I detest spam. I don’t like it in my email. I don’t like it on websites and reading the spam dropped into blog comments leaves me feeling tainted. I’m also involved in online reputation management for a few clients, and spam that involves the clients’ name can be very hard to work with. This issue [...]

  June 17th, 2009

• Bing Spamming Twitter?

  Although I registered for Twitter about a year ago, I’ve only begun seriously using it since late last year. I’m interested in how Bing has been faring, and to reply to a question in the AdWords Help Forum, I remembered that I’d seen one of the people I follow, mentioning the full path to Bing [...]

  June 5th, 2009

• SEO, IIS case folding filenames, Spiders, Analytics, and Robots.Txt

  AFAICS, the best way to administer IIS for SEO purposes, seems to be to run screaming from the room and hide under a desk until you are allowed to use Apache. So many of the default behaviours create difficulties for users or SEO. Yes, I’ve been continuing to dig into web analytics and IIS web [...]

  August 20th, 2008

• IIS Cookieless Generates Spider Crawling Problems

  Another case of Web Server Log File Analysis on IIS being disturbed by bots, having the potential for SEO naughtiness and spamming the search engines. The problem is created by IIS’s cookieless model. The idea appears to be to present a unique string in the path so you can track sessions without needing a cookie. [...]

  August 18th, 2008

• Spam in Comments, Unattributed Content

  This article was triggered by a possibly spammy comment, and lead to investigating the quality of the site that was offered in the link. Bizarrely, it leads to further reflections on Google, and the Content Network. I struggle to make the Content Network work for my clients, at a reasonable ROI, and Google itself turns [...]

  February 7th, 2008

• Google Bowling And Identity

  Reducing the search engine ranking of competitors, known as “Google Bowling”, is getting some air time. A brief summary article “8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site” describes some techniques that can damage rank and steal or reduce traffic to a site. Of the eight techniques described, seven depend on weak identity online, and [...]

  September 17th, 2007

• Anatomy of a Web Spam Attack

  We’ve recently watched spammers at work, from initial contact through to dropping a litter trail across a site. This is on one of our own sites, rather than a client site, so we’re happy to share what we’ve seen. Because this activity doesn’t involve client data, and is clearly activity that is not intended to [...]

  September 9th, 2007