spam

It's really easy these days.

No, really it is.

OK so in the past it was hard (cough) to rank on the front page of Google if you were new to the business, in any sector. Lots of things were (actually still are for non real-time) taken into account in order for your site to rank well for a given term. Lots of weight is given to credibility, i.e. other sites (humans) thinking your site IS credible, by the way of incoming links. If we all link to a site it must be good content right? This model has been Google's backbone product for years, forever actually.

Then came Twitter and the mob

This experiment has been conducted numerous times in other places, and you may have come across it already, but because I think Google is shooting itself in the foot it warrants a mention.

So Google has started including "real-time" results in its index, in particular from Twitter, the micro-blogging service. This basically means it is open season for you and me to actively use this service as a tactic to appear on the front page of Google for any given search phrase.

Down to business

So considering Tiger Woods is hot news at the moment I figured this would be a good test target for ranking. Before the inclusion of real-time the chances of appearing on the front page of Google for "Tiger Woods" were slim pickings for mere mortals. Typically, of course, it would usually have only been credible news sources, or perhaps other content that was mass approved through incoming links (us all linking to it). That is still the model Google has in place with the exception of a little iframe half way down the page, the real-time zone.

So I sent out a tweet as follows

OK, so a tweet that clearly contains Tiger Woods and some other attention grabbing nonsense and an all important link that someone may click on (in this case an intelligence test, just for the irony of it).

So a few moments later, literally within a minute or so I searched Google for "Tiger Woods" and sure enough found my tweet.

You can clearly see my ridiculous tweet, and my url.

Why is this bad?

Well think about it for a moment, this is now open season for real-time spam... hell I might even employ someone in a developing country, pay them peanuts, to sit down and tweet nonsense all day, with affiliate links included in the tweets, and target very competitive key phrases. < oh that happens already?

What do you say? - you could say hey Chris this is fabulous, people are all wonderful people and good through to their core, and we'd never ever game the system, our tweets are credible and we only speak the truth. Well folks, I have news for you, that is not the case with the masses, and once the search dudes and dudettes catch on to this (done), you can be sure to see utter nonsense in that real-time zone.

Google, you have gone nuts.

I wrote this page so that you do not have to "view source" to ascertain if I use the "no-follow" tag in the comments section of this Blog, or not. By reading this you can be safe in the knowledge that I do not employ it.

The no-follow tag was invented as a method of trying to eliminate Blog comment spam, which was playing havoc with dear Google's algorithm. So what you'll discover now is that the majority of Blogging platforms now ship with the "no-follow" tag included in the code. You can easily check that out by "viewing source" and looking at the HTML itself, if you do not know what that means it's time to learn.

No-follow?

Yes, this is a snippet of code which instructs search engine robots to not follow urls in a web, or more to the point, to not pass on any page rank to the linked page. The logic here is that unscrupulous webmasters/mistresses were using robots (still do) to automatically post comments with a url back to their site which they are/were pimping.

Why take it out?

I have not employed it on my Blog here because I think that if you are kind enough to come along and leave a comment the least I can do is share some Google Juice back to your site, it would be pretty selfish otherwise, which is common practise actually. As well as that I have an anti-spam comment system in place which is perfectly adequate of detecting a human.

Disclaimer

If you represent any of the following niches I will always edit your link, so you would be wasting your time posting.

• Gambling
• Porn
• Religious fanatics
• Hate and bigotry

I am the editor of my site, if you do not like it, move on.

Gmail Tip

You might not be aware of this (I wasn’t until recently).

You can use your gmail username with a + after it with absolutely anything and you’ll still get the email.

You what?

Yep, for example my username is “chambly”, so I could let’s say use chambly+disposable@gmail.com and I’d still get the email.

Or chambly+yahoosignup@gmail.com and I’d get the email still.

Why is this so cool?

Well you can use different combinations for different contacts you may meet, say +business, +friends, or say +spam if you want to sign up to a site but fear spam. You can then set up filters in gmail to filter your mail based on the +whatever, keeping you very organised and your precious username lean.

I love that tip, think it's handy yourself?