UN: Spam problem solvable in two years

Oh man, those at Netzeitung don't have much of a clue, do they? Calling the ITU the UN is more than silly. The ITU is indeed a UN organization - but it is primarily carried by companies, especially large telecommunications enterprises. Above all, the ITU is one thing: the arch-enemy of the IETF.

Because the ITU thinks it's responsible for all communication systems and believes it should have a say in the Internet as well. But the IETF is the standards body there (or rather, not a standards body, but just an RFC manager). Standards in the IETF are created in a completely different way than in the ITU.

The ITU defines standards in committees. Access is regulated and burdened with hefty fees. Private individuals have no chance of getting into the ITU - that only works through national institutions or large companies. What becomes a standard is drafted in closed working groups - and based on what the participants want. As a rule, an ITU standard ends up as a collection of all requirements. The standard itself is often only available for a fee, reference implementations before standardization work is rarely available, and implementations in general are usually proprietary and cost money.

The IETF, on the other hand, only manages the organizational part - the actual RFCs are created in open working groups. Anyone who wants to can participate. RFCs must - if they want to be on the standards track - demonstrate two independent but interoperable implementations that must be accessible to everyone. Existing and free code defines what becomes a standard.

ITU statements on the Internet topic are often simply attempts to gain influence in an area where the ITU plays no role, even though communication technology is increasingly oriented in that direction. You only need to think about Internet telephony to see what kind of problem this could cause for the ITU - which currently controls almost the entire telephony sector.

But precisely because of the very different working methods, almost nobody actually wants the ITU as a relevant organization in the Internet sector. An Internet in which standards are defined by national representatives and large companies would not be where the Internet is today thanks to the sleeves-rolled-up and pragmatic approach of the IETF.

So please don't sneak the ITU into titles as the UN. It's not the UN that wants something, but the ITU - and what it wants is only indirectly related to our problems. What it wants is influence and control.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you'll find the original article.

Test of the Influence of Google Spamming on Blog Hosting Users

Well, I have to chime in too. Of course Dirk is right when he points out a weakness in the Google system. Of course he has the free choice what he does with his blog platform - even making it available to Google spammers. But if he does that, he has to deal with the resulting backlash. And it comes.

What is Google spamming about? Not everyone may be clear on what's behind it. So here's an explanation of some phenomena related to it. Ultimately, so-called search optimizers bet on the fact that the advertised websites are linked in many places. Through linking, the ranking in Google rises. The more links, the higher. The higher the ranking, the higher the advertised website appears in Google's result list. And that's exactly what these people sell. Improvement of the position in Google search results. Search optimizers sometimes do this themselves by finding link partners for the site to be promoted. That's the positive method. It requires work, but that's what they're paid for. The result is usually small link networks between companies with complementary products - in principle a real-life form of "customers who like this product also like that product," like you know from Amazon. But there are also others that are far from positive. These other methods rely on external Google-juice (that's the jokingly used term for the base ranking of a website). The reason: if a website has a high Google ranking through linking, it can pass some of that on to pages it links to. A link from a site with high ranking is rated better than a link from a site with low ranking. Google spamming targets this.

Some search optimizers operate link farms - these are simply lots of domains and web servers without real meaningful content. Usually the pages are simply filled with words according to usage frequency (so search engines can find something). These link farms form a closed circle of sites that now has to become large enough for Google to use it for ranking. That gives the optimizer a basic ranking. Advertised sites are now linked from these link farms and pushed in ranking. Who operates like this, for example, is the Scientology Church. The disadvantage for the optimizer: it's some work and the costs are there for the many sites in the link farm. But it can be well automated. However, Google can also easily recognize it and ban it from the index!

The second approach to using external Google ranking is simple ranking parasitism. This can happen in two ways. The better known is comment spamming. Many suffer from it.

The reason for comment spamming is simply that the weblog scene through its index pages, central services, and links to each other has very high Google ranking. This means that links from weblogs to websites are highly valued by Google - the corresponding links appear multiple times through page replication and content syndication (for example, the excerpts and links at blogg.de are syndication).

We simply have with weblogs.com, various German indices, main pages of weblog communities like Antville servers, and all the regional services, with Geourl, with open syndicators (Phantom4 thingies for example) and who knows what else crawling around there - extremely fast high ranking. Many central pages simply link only to weblogs - are classified by Google through the many links as link hubs, and the linked pages inherit some of the Google-juice of the central page. Additionally, on some central pages the title links and sometimes the content of weblogs are replicated. Also, the weblogs link very strongly to each other and thus push their Google-juice up mutually.

Comment spamming relies on the fact that Google indexes the comments on many weblogs - this is especially true for weblog systems where the comments are integrated into the layout, as Moveable Type can do it, or for another example: the Schockwellenreiter's blog. My own is less of a target for comment spammers because my comments are external to the website - and are excluded from Google indexing by a robots.txt (you can also just disable traversal and leave indexing active, that should be enough). Comments on weblogs with lots of Google-juice become positive for the target websites.

Here people build on foreign Google-juice without providing their own performance (content) and therefore it is parasitism.

The same applies to what happens at blogger.de. Huh? Why are they parasiting? They have their own blogs, don't they? Yes. But these own pseudo-blogs are on a community server. The blogger.de server - if it's actively used for blogs - will build up quite a bit of Google-juice, just like it is with all Antville systems. The reason is the integration into the main index. What's only missing is a correspondingly high number of weblogs with content, preferably with high internal linking as seen on other Antville servers (many ants link to other ants), and that reflected through the main page - that produces plenty of Google-juice. Through the bloggers.

A ranking optimizer can use this well by occasionally posting on their own blogs that point to websites to be promoted. Once the blogger.de main page has good Google-juice through the bloggers themselves, it becomes interesting for them. Ultimately they're also just parasiting from the webloggers here, though not quite as directly as with comment spam - here they're more parasiting from the community than from the individual blogger.

Everyone has to decide for themselves how they handle this and what they think of such methods, but I'm of the opinion that normal, editorially maintained blogs would bring just as much for the companies to be promoted - but they would also give back content for the bloggers. Of course that's work - but it would be an honest form of search engine optimization that would also benefit from external Google-juice, but at least would integrate itself into the system with content.

The current ranking blogs on blogger.de with their nonsense content are a pure parasitic solution that I would strictly reject on hosts I operate, should they ever appear.

At Nochn Blogg. you'll find the original article.

soksoksoksok

Translation from German to English

Hmm. Well, if I look at the text and effects of the story and think about it a bit, I would draw the following conclusion: a Japanese porn site is using weblogs.com and the weblogs announced there for porn spam by mirroring these sites (apparently only part of the pages), removing all references to the original site and replacing them with references to their own content. As a result, Google not only finds the content of these weblogs on the blog itself, but also on the pornified mirror.

As a result, this porn site parasitically uses the content to climb higher in the rankings itself. But since they exchange all the links, the backlinks are lost - and of course nobody links to the porn mirror (okay, nobody except Ben Hammersley). This way they can't exploit the actual ranking factor of blogs - the high linking - for their own purposes.

So all in all it's actually a pretty stupid action, especially since the site primarily targets the Asian region - and who enters German search terms there, for example?

It's of course possible that when using Japanese search engines or restricting search results to the Japanese domain space, these sites climb to the top because of the content, since they apparently use the changes from weblogs.com to also change the mirror pages - and thus pretend to be frequently changing pages that rank higher in search engine scanning and thus possibly also in the ranking.

But does it really work? In any case, I haven't seen any porn spam mirrors in my search results. However, what this shows is that we have to reckon with spam appearing in completely different areas. Comment spam already exists in the blogosphere, but website spam is not yet so common. But it will come.

To what extent one can take legal action against this content theft is unfortunately questionable, since copyright doesn't apply everywhere.

The original article is at Ben Hammersley.com, here.