sunir (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sunir) wrote,@ 2005-01-19 02:06:00 |
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LinkSpam?mers like ShotgunSpam flood open conversations on the Internet as a way of raising their profile on Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and other SearchEngines. Google's PageRank? algorithm is famously about counting references to a page rather than keywords on it, and so it makes sense to increase the number of references to your client's page by throwing links to it as far and wide as possible on the Internet. There is an economic incentive to do this because a higher PageRank? leads ostensibly to more sales or more traffic or whatever is of value.
Thus, in the vein of NotIndexed, SixApart? and Google have [proposed] the simple EconomicSolution of flagging all outbound links on blogs with
rel="nofollow" which tells the SearchEngine spiders to ignore these links in their data sets. Without the economic incentive, spammers in theory will stop spamming since it's costly and pointless.This strategy will be a failure on several grounds.
- Invisibility. Spammers will not be aware of what blogs or wikis or BulletinBoardSystems have implemented this or not. In theory they could check the page to see whether it is the case, but in practice most spammers don't deeply understand the Internet and the Web. Their objectives are simply to create links to their client's site. A blog is a blog as a wiki is a wiki. Even if savvy spammers stop, naive spammers will still keep coming.
- Partial coverage. Even if some spammers became aware that some blogs and wikis implemented this, many will not, particularly the millions of older blogs and wikis that are GhostTown?s waiting to be spammed. Thus, the incentive to spam blogs and wikis will never go away from this strategy alone as only newer or active fora will be upgraded. With a large pool of potential targets where the vast majority are worth the effort, many spammers will just hit all of them.
- DelayAction. A common solution at least on wikis is to make all links that have been created within a certain period of time, say two weeks, inactive in some way, such as forwarding them through an ExternalRedirector? or through a NoFollow tag. However, many abandoned GhostTown?s that are not properly configured will happily let link spam lapse through this quanantine period and become live. Thus, there remains the incentive to just spam all wikis. After all, some will stick, and that's all that matters.
- Indirect action. Link spam does not have a direct and obvious impact on the final PageRank? of a client site, only an indirect one that is opaque (cf. OpenProcess#badvogato). One does not know what the actual impact of one specific link is to a given SearchEngine, so one may presume it is above zero. Spammers may conclude that SearchEngines ignore the NoFollow hint just as they ignore the meta keywords they created years ago. After all, search engines rely on links to rank pages. As such, there is value in spreading LinkSpam? around even in uncertain circumstances. That's all it will take to induce spam once again.
- Decapitation. Blogs, wikis, and other discussion fora that form the TwoWayWeb serve a critical function as a BalancingForce to traditional power centres. As the CluetrainManifesto asserts, the discussions amongst TheAudience are more powerful than the voice of TheAuthor alone. Yet implementing NoFollow or other techniques to remove discussions from the data sets of SearchEngines decapitates the very purpose of these fora in the global battle for attention. What's the point of blogs if they do not compete for power and attention in Google? Without making outward links count, how can criticism of say Union Carbide ever hope to raise the Bhopal disaster to the #2 position?
The outcome of this is not simply to say to bloggers and other amateur commentators buying service from cooperating providers or downloading software built by collaborating developers, "Retreat!" It's not just that poor third world spammers have decimate the vox populi of the rich first world latté set. The outcome is also to bias the SearchEngines towards the owners and controllers of the static web. The non-discursive, traditional power centres that have dominated the world since the Industrial Revolution. Brochureware and other non-critical messages will increasingly dominate the rankings, leaving the rest of us run over by the Cluetrain that we were supposedly on just a decade ago.
Admittedly, bloggers will continue to make links that count in their own postings. The loss will only be in the comments. Thus, the actual effect for blogs is not so great. For wikis, however, the distinction between TheAudience and TheAuthor is none, and thus the impact is much greater.
