Spam on the View Counter

I was about to celebrate my 60,000 viewer, and started to investigate why my view rate has increased a fair bit lately and unfortunately its mainly due to two site vampirestats and adsensewatchdog (please don't visit them), they are a new sort of spam. They don't have anything to do with google or adsense. They are apparently just polling our blogs in an attempt for you to link back, but it is hard to see why they are doing this.

• Are they just gaming google?
• Are they harmless?
• Can their views be automatically wound back to restore the integrity of the view counter?
• Why doesn't google block them on blogger?

But I’m not a spammer? …Am I?

I’ve had a couple of hassles from the algorithmic gatekeepers on flickr this month.

1. The first is probably more a Yahoo issue, Earlier this month I was presenting a free session at the local library on using flickr for seniors. The on-line examples didn’t go so well, it barely went at all, just getting adequate Wi-Fi access proved difficult, presumable because of the bandwidth demands (of all the pictures). However the real let down was in the Join Up. Apparently Yahoo have a new feature that stops multiple log in and account set up from one ISP (ie one library) along with a few other issues. So only a couple of lucky participant could create an account at all. Further the new gmail sign up doesn’t seem to work at all from iPhones? All a bit frustrating when you are making a presentation of how nice and easy to use flickr is.
2. The second is slightly more distressing for me. You see it now appears I am suspected of being a spammer, and not allow to use my Flickr Mail. I really hope I am not a spammer! All I wanted to do was invite participants in the VIC/TAS comp thread within the Australian Photographers group on flickr to an exhibition of photographs by three of The VIC/TAS contributors, including me. I started to email them one by one over a considerable space of time. Alas when I had got to 40 plus I got the message above and I have remained on  flickr mail lock out for nearly three days. So if you are a VIC/TAS contributor and haven’t got an invite sorry, but  look here.

 

Perhaps all these procedures and automatic filters are seen as generally desirable, to block out the unsocial behaviour of many but there is a danger that these same things will stop the true social behaviour of the few. As Elli Pariser noted in a recent TED talk  we must be careful  “The FiIlter Bubble” doesn’t narrow our on-line world to a net of one.

Avoiding the Black Hats & Spammers

I have become aware that at least one of my blog posts has again been “scrapped” and reposted as an exact copy of my original post, including picture and layout, on a spam site (I will not give you the link because you should not go there, and specially never every click on links you find on these dodgy looking “content farms”). At worse they will contain links to other spam and potentially malware. At best these lazy spamdexers are just trying to attract innocent links, thus page views and a higher google ranking, to their site using lots of plagiarized (aka stolen) content. It is a dishonest practice, and sorry I can do nothing about it.
What disappoints me most about all this black hat SEO trickery and blog scrapping is the fact that Google in many cases is paying the very spammers and thieves for the stolen content! The content farms have mostly been greedy & also monetized their site using Google’s own adsense. So try reporting this Google??? I have found there is a massive blankness, no response from anyone. You may remember my previous post on a lesson of theft versus sharing. Well that site, which looks a lot like a legitimate camera review site, still exists, it just keeps changing its name slightly, its ISP, its country of origin and its owner name, so that DMCA notices to cease and desist also go unanswered. At least that low life now acknowledges my posts and links back to my site (he may think technically he doesn’t breach my Creative Common Licence, but what he does is still not legal because he is expecting Google to still pay him for my content and my CC license is for NON commercial).  I can not find him, but Google obviously still can because he still displays an adsense badge. Am I being too cynical about Google’s apparent hypocrisy and will to fix this? Rant over for now.

As I indicated above there is little I can do, but there might be something you can do if you use chrome as your browser, Google has released an add-in that gives you a personal blocklist of such sites as you come across them. It will also transmit your blocking patterns back to Google, in theory they will then get a good crowd sourced blacklist of such websites and thus downgrade these undesirables in their famous search algorithms. Let us hope Google will follow through on this.

SPAM in comments

I get waves of SPAM links in my comments, and I delete them.

It seems I am the current the favourite target of some chinese spamers, so here is the warning guys, I will treat you the same.

评论与垃圾邮件的链接将被删除