Web News |
Australia
Business Confidence Remains Unchanged In June
(RTTNews) - Australia's business confidence for the month of June 2006 remained
unchanged, and showed a declining trend, while the business conditions for the
month remained strong on seasonally...
Australia:
Business Method Patents – Australian Full Court Clarifies Patentability
Due to international jurisprudence, it has always been good practice to ensure
that business method patent specifications include at least some physical manifestation
or technical element...
One
in Five Business Calls is Mobile
Australian businesses are replacing around one in every ten landline calls with
Mobile calls, said IDC’s latest end-user Telecommunications Survey on Australia
Business Wireless Usage and Preferences...
Australia's
Emeco says IPO to raise A$944.2 mln
Australia's top earthmoving equipment hire company, Emeco Holdings Ltd. (EHL.AX: Quote, Profile, Research), said on Thursday its initial public offering (IPO) was expected to raise about A$944.2 million ($715 million), less than initially...
Australia IPO Market May Have Passed Peak - HLB Mann Judd
With commodity prices likely to ease, signs global growth is slowing and expectations share market returns will moderate after three solid years, Australia's booming initial public offering market may have passed its peak, HLB Mann Judd Corporate Finance said in a report released Thursday...
|
|
|
Recent Articles |
IT
Job Future In Talking, Not Coding
Prospective college computer majors have been fleeing to other majors, since the
real skills associated with a future in information technology look less like
those one needs from a four-year or longer computer science program. A recent
Computerworld...
Yahoo
Appoints New Data Mining Expert
Doctor Raghu Ramakrishnan will leave the land of badgers and Big Ten football
for the opportunity to serve as a research fellow in Yahoo! Research. Ramakrishnan
joins Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan...
Technorati
Gets "Major Update"
Technorati founder and CEO Dave Sifry made a big entry on the site's Weblog today to celebrate its third birthday and announce a number of updates. A lot of the changes appear to reflect users' suggestions, and he noted, "This is just a start - there's more to come."
Keyword
Price Hikes Expected In Long Term
Search engine marketers should prepare themselves for "explosive keyword inflation"
over the next few years, according to a keynote address given by SearchEngineWatch's
Chris Sherman. Sherman's words are relayed to us via...
|
|
|
07.27.06
Google's Tag To Remove Content Spamming
 By
Danny Wirken
Content spamming, in its simplest form, is the taking of content from other sites that rank well on the search engines, and then either using it as-it-is or using a utility software like Articlebot to scramble the content to the point that it can't be detected with plagiarism software.
In either case, your good, search-engine-friendly content is stolen and used, often as part of a doorway page, to draw the attention of the search engines away from you.
Everyone has seen examples of this: the page that looks promising but contains lists of terms (like term - term paper - term papers - term limits) that link to other similar lists, each carrying Google advertising. Or the site that contains nothing but content licensed from Wikipedia. Or the site that plays well in a search but contains nothing more than SEO gibberish, often ripped off from the site of an expert and minced into word slaw.
These sites are created en masse to provide a fertile ground to draw eyeballs. It seems a waste of time when you receive a penny a view for even the best-paying ads - but when you put up five hundred sites at a time, and you've figured out how to get all of them to show up on the first page or two of a lucrative Google search term, it can be surprisingly profitable.
The losers are the people who click on these pages, thinking that there is content of worth on these sites - and you. Your places are stolen from the top ten by these spammers. Google is working hard to lock them out, but there is more that you can do to help Google.
Using The Antispam Tag
But there is another loser. One of the strengths of the Internet is that it allows
for two-way public communication on a scale never seen before. You post a blog,
or set up a wiki; your audience comments on your blog, or adds and changes your
wiki.
The problem? While you have complete control over a website and its contents in the normal way of things, sites that allow for user communication remove this complete control from you and give it to your readers. There is no way to prevent readers of an open blog from posting unwanted links, except for manually removing them. Even then, links can be hidden in commas or periods, making it nearly impossible to catch everything.
This leaves you open to the accusation of link spam - for links you never put out there to begin with. And while you may police the most recent several blogs you've posted, no one polices the ones from several years ago. Yet Google still looks at them and indexes them. By 2002, bloggers everywhere were begging Google for an ignore tag of some sort to prevent its spiders from indexing comment areas.
Not only, they said, would bloggers be grateful; everyone with two-way uncontrolled communication - wikis, forums, guest books - needed this service from Google. Each of these types of sites has been inundated with spam at some point, forcing some to shut down completely. And Google itself needed it to help prevent the rampant spam in the industry.
In 2005, Google finally responded to these concerns. Though their solution is not everything the online community wanted (for instance, it leads to potentially good content being ignored as well as spam), it does at least allow you to section out the parts of your blog that are public. It is the "nofollow" attribute.
"Nofollow" allows you to mark a portion of your web page, whether you're running a blog or you want to section out paid advertising, as an area that Google spiders should ignore. The great thing about it is that not only does it keep your rankings from suffering from spam, it also discourages spammers from wasting your valuable comments section with their junk text.
The most basic part of this attribute involves embedding it into a hyperlink as
. This allows you to manually flag links, such as those embedded in paid advertising,
as links Google spiders should ignore. But what if the content is user-generated?
It's still a problem because you certainly don't have time to go through and mark
all those links up.
Fortunately, blogging systems have been sensitive to this new development. Whether you use Wordpress or another blogging system, most have implemented either automated "nofollow" links in their comment sections, or have issued plugins you can implement yourself to prevent this sort of spamming.
This does not solve every problem. But it's a great start. Be certain you know how your user-generated content system provides this service to you. In most cases, a software update will implement this change for you.
Is This Spamming And Will Google Block Me?
There's another problem with the spamming crowd. When you're fighting search engine spam and start seeing the different forms it can take - and, disturbingly, realizing that some of your techniques for your legitimate site are similar - you have to wonder: Will Google block me for my search engine optimization techniques?
Click
here to continue reading this article.
About the Author:
http://www.theinternetone.net |
