How Google Is Cleaning The Web Of Comment Spam | Hacker News Reader

How Google Is Cleaning The Web Of Comment Spam

forbes.com

58 pointscryptoz29 comments

It's cute, but negative SEO can lead to extortion.

A blackhat actor puts links to your site all over their network of bad content sites and then forces you to pay them to remove their link.

A competitor might create bad links to your site to push you down in Google's SERP and you'd never know what was going on if you didn't know how to look this up.

A "disavowal tool" was meant to help combat this kind of extortion, but imagine how much work it would be to monitor this kind of activity and disavow all sites that might want to create bad links to your site to drive you down.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Google should penalize sites that allow comment spam. Incentives are then clearly aligned, as the affected site has the power to fix its problem. Sites that can't afford to moderate their contents should just turn comments off.

As mentioned in other comments, the changes described may just change the spam. Instead of linking to your own site, you instead link to sites ranked above yours.

I suspect that if Google put it's collective brain power on it they could do what we've done and not rank comment links. One of the 'easy' things to do is run your ranker on the crawl where you disregard any reader contributed content. That does wonders. What is less doable is when the blogger is in on it (as they were with the recent scandal) and the links are in the page.

But here is the thing, Google has a content evaluator as part of their Adsense for Content product and they should be able to compute the equivalent of the 'hamming distance' between the linked pages and the content on the current page and construct a decent rank. Certainly that is what I would do if I had the resources to crawl as much of the web as they do.

I'm fairly certain that Google in their 15+ year existence has already done what you mentioned in first paragraph.

"Done" is the important word here - done as in wrote the code and performance tested it and looked at the impact - yes of course. Done as in made PageRank across Google use it officially - made the algorithm driving billions of dollars of spending on line ignore all comments. that's a big ask.

This article seems overly optimistic. SEOs can now add spam links to competitor sites to negatively affect their pagerank.

My thoughts exactly.

They could and have done this for a while. Used to see it in the blackhat marketing space, where content farms wishing to rank higher than other farms spammed their competition. Was glad to see the content farms go circa 2011 (Panda update).

Hate giving people ideas, but a majority of the fiverr SEO services are geared towards spam/link bombing competitors.

Maybe that's not the intended use of the "SEO" services, but I fail to see what else they would be good at.

Exactly, and now it puts the onus on the website owners to make use of the disavowal tool, which can only be done with extra monitoring on their part.

Does the disavowal tool negatively affect the sites being disavowed?

It 'shouldn't otherwise it too could be used as a tool for negative campaigns. I would assume though that it will be used for looking at trends, footprints and other methods of better refining the detection algorithms.

Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin just don't know how to do any kind of SEO beyond link building. Kelly Clay at Forbes wrote a much better article about how SEO has changed.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/11/19/seo-isnt-de...

The spammers have more tricks than they used to, and aren't telling most of the SEO's how to game the system, but Spam is actually easier because Google is weeding out the people who don't have the time or ability to do Page Construction spam.

You honestly think that Fishkin doesn't know his SEO? Thing is, he has to keep his reputation squeaky clean because unlike black hats he actually wants it to last beyond the next ranking update. Most black hats and their clients get caught sooner or later and then you find them bitching and moaning around the web how Google's latest ranking algorithm update is unfair and running them out of business. Guys like Rand Fishkin are smarter than that.

The sooner we devalue the link of its SEO power entirely, the better.

I've run a small wiki for many years. I'm probably going to shutter it because it's such a target for link spammers. (MediaWiki's anti-spam tools aren't very good unless you have many dedicated editors.)

Now that a critical mass of people are using Chrome, I suspect that there is a much better signal in the haystack of user behavior data than back links. A much better algorithm in theory could be built using the actual usage patterns of discriminating humans rather than the link landscape of the web.

That sounds terrible - dystopian even.

I would far rather the google data be made public

I always felt Disqus was trying to solve the issue of comment spam.

How?

Authentication before commenting being the biggest. People have been trying to do link spamming on comments forever. Disqus attempts to legitimize and monetize it with their sponsored stories/links.

and then you get false positives. I was somehow trapped by their spam detection, even though my comments were totally legit, I've had a good 'track record' etc.

It doesn't tell you anything about it, the post author wasn't notified either.

Eh, all of the forum spam I get is from "users" who have actually created accounts and sometimes posted halfway legit comments (it's a music theory forum, and they obviously don't know anything about theory, but post something that tries to fake it) before starting to post spam.

The best solution is removing the incentive (though I've had rel="nofollow" auto-added to all links since it was first proposed, to no avail...).

Meanwhile Yandex is trying to move past ranking based on incoming links. Coming soon: search results with zero ranking weight of any links (on commercially heavy queries, anyway).

http://www.seroundtable.com/yandex-links-17786.html

At present moment the no-links ranking technology from Yandex is vaporware, though I certainly think it may be better for some of the queries.

To be honest, they've been threatening black SEO for ages to no avail.

...Google is obviously well versed in this economics stuff, that incentives matter....If you change the incentives then you will change peoples’ behavior.

Google has a $50 billion annual revenue inventive from advertisers to not give a shit about our privacy. There's very little incentive to protect user privacy because people are easily tricked into believing that trading their privacy gets them something free in return when in fact it is not free at all, and in fact even more expensive than it would have been [1].

What is needed is a non-profit, open-source search engine. And the same for social networking. Perhaps Wikipedia style. Let's ditch the bad incentives.

[1] No free lunch, no free web, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624666

I would pay for a service that clean [my] phpBB forums!

I'm really surprised this doesn't exist. Moderation-as-a-Service, with a team of well-trained subject-neutral moderators.

There is such a service. You just have to look for it. I'm building a wiki, so it is something that I could conceivably use.

If such a thing existed, it would be wasted on internet forums.

Google must care enough about comment spam to clean it up because their algo still relies too much on it. If they just ignored comment spam altogether and their organic algorithm didn't rely on it then they wouldn't be spending time and resources to clean it up.

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