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Tips for wiki spammers
Posted by Daniel Schneider on July 8 2011 at 2:30 p.m.
Dear spammers,
Most of you probably are in a difficult economical situation and you need to earn money by polluting wikis with ads and I can understand that. According to Wikipedia, Western so-called link promotion services pay about $0.80 to $1.20 for each 1,000 solved CAPTCHAs to companies employing human solvers in Bangladesh, China, India, and many other developing nations.
Let me tell you why spamming Mediawikis is a waste of time and counterproductive.
- Links are no-follow, e.g. Google and other search engines won't promote a website by the fact that it is linked from here. No one will ever see a page about electronic cigarettes or other crappy content.
- Each page edit is also protected by a Captcha. Even after you manually create a login, spamming scripts won't work.
- Since I use this Wiki for myself about every day, I immediately remove spam and block users. That takes me only a few seconds.
- I also use a blacklist of words and web addresses. Even some rather harmful words like "paris-hilton" won't pass.
- You badly will hurt other users in your country. EduTechWiki is very popular in so-called emerging countries. E.g. India is #2 and the Philippines are #5 and I get about 7000 different "real" users / month from each. This number is going down since after two spams or so I will just block your whole domain. Other Mediawiki owners do the same since we just can't spend our time fighting spam.
Now a question and a tip to link promotion companies and spamming sub-contractors:
- Do you really want whole areas in developing countries to be taken of the map ? I know that some people block entire countries from accessing their website. I never will go that far personally.
- Stupid link promotion just doesn't work much anymore. There are millions of link sites out there and (again) most wikis and blogs have a no-follow policy. Even Google, a company that makes its living from advertisement, now is recognizing that you guys are actually killing their business. If you want to promote a website, provide some truly useful information and services and people will find you. How about paying people in the third world to write tutorials and/or to write extensive product information sheets ?
PS:
- Serious authors don't need to bother with Captchas. Just ask me and I will put you into another group. Normally I do this automatically, but I may miss someone.
- Tips for other Mediawiki owners: Read Spam
Original Post: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Blog:DKS/Tips_for_wiki_spammers
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