Bloggers of the World : Unite ! « planetOzh

You have a blog. You like it, you're devoting time and energy to it. And everyday, you're being utterly infuriated by casino spammers messing with your comments, your trackbacks, your referrers logs, hostages and victims in their pathetic race to top Page Rank.

Bloggers, unite. The idea is simple : a million blogs are stronger than a thousand spammers when it comes to act upon search engine results, especially if they are using the same weapon. To nullify their spamming efforts, put on your site the following link : Online Poker (wikipedia page on this topic, all links mentionned there have rel="nofollow")

If a million bloggers do so, game over for casino spammers, no one will ever get first rank. Vain, futile, but delicious revenge. Spread the word !

More explanations

Why are spammers doing what they are doing ? They have two goals in mind :

1. Earn a few clicks : each time they post a link somewhere, there is a little chance someone clicks on it, and consequently a slight chance they earn a new customer.
2. Gain visibility : this is their primary target. Each time a search engine bot (for example, Googlebot, the "machine" that crawls the internet and logs pages and links) indexes a page where there are links to some site, this site is granted more "page ranking". More site linking to your web means greater page rank, and therefore better position in search engine results. Basically, what spammers are trying to achieve is being result #1 returned by a Google query.

Pouring links to your site all over the net is called Google Bombing, and can be quite effective (follow the link to Wikipedia, it's (as often there) an interesting read).

About rel="nofollow"

Main search engines now support link attribute rel="nofollow" : when such a link is followed by a search engine spider, the linked site is not granted any page ranking bonus.
This is a good start, but this is not enough. Not everyone or every blog will implement this tag, mostly by lack of knowledge. Moreover, there are already millions of pages crippled with spam links.

Using rel="nofollow" in your site for links in comments is a good thing : it ignores spammers. But putting a link to Online Poker on Wikipedia goes a step further : it acts against spammers.

Unite !

Efficiency of linking to Online Poker on Wikipedia is a matter of number. The more blogs do it, the quicker Wikipedia will become result #1 in search engines queries for "online poker".

Somewhere in your site, for example in your "Links", put the following code :

If you think such a link could make your visitors curious about your motivations, feel free to use the following one:

Output will be : Online Poker ^?

Write this code wherever you can and are invited to do so : on your site, in your forum sigs. But please don't put it in random blogs as spammers would do.

They're in !

I'll try to keep track of weblogs and site I know are supporting this effort, obviously to give the link they're showing even more exposure. Of course, I cannot find them all, so whenever I come accross one, I'll add it here. If you're not listed here, feel free to leave a comment or send me a note. If you are listed here and for some weird reason don't want to, well, send me an email too :)

They are not playing Online Poker !

Update 15/03/2005 : the idea has really gone wild through the blogosphere now, and I just can't list every site mentionning it :) On 03/03/05 the community site Alt 1040 introduced it to the spanish speaking internet community, and two weeks later Threadwatch was slashdotted about this story. There are now numerous sites talking about this, positively or not. But talking about it anyway :)

Ranklog

Or, if Online Poker ranking had a changelog :

• 2005-02-19 : the page doesn't even show in the first 800 results on query "online poker" in Google
• 2005-02-22 : page appears at #32
• 2005-02-24 : #19
• 2005-02-27 : #14
• 2005-03-01 : #13
• 2005-03-01 : #12
• 2005-03-12 : #3
• 2005-03-12 : #2
• ...
• someday : #1

Its rank may vary from an hour to another, or depending on what localized Google you're using (.com, .co.uk, .nl, ...). The rank I'm logging here reflects the one showed on Google.com when I have a look at it.
Sometimes, the page doesn't even show in Google, I'm not sure what is the explanation here, I guess it has to do with Google's servers synchronizing their databases maybe. In such a case, just check a couple of hours later :)

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