Hacking relevance: Linkjacking, Googlebombs, and fake blogs
I get a lot of blogspam. While I installed Akismet recently, I still haven’t figured out how to purge the 2,500 or so comments in my backlog; many of those comments contain HTML that tries to co-opt the browser.
Miscreants have figured out how to hijack links, how to inflate page rank, and more; and it’s an arms race between the very real business of search engine optimization and the Ph.D’s at Google. I’ll put all of these under the collective term, “hacking relevance.” Because that’s ultimately the goal of all this stuff — to hack relevance by making something appear more useful or important than it is.
Google’s business is all about relevance — directing attention to the most relevant information. To do this, they look at dozens of clues, one of which is the number and nature of links to a page. This led to an attack called a Googlebomb, in which millions of co-conspirators made links to a single page, and each of them included a specific term in the link. Most famously, a campaign to link the word “failure” to the White House meant that the whitehouse.gov was the top-ranked link for the word “failure.”
Since this clearly wasn’t everyone’s idea of relevance, Google adjusted its algorithms so you could only qualify as relevant with lots of incoming links and the relevant content on your page. In other words, if millions of people linked to Bitcurrent with the word “candy floss” this site wouldn’t rank highly because it’s not about candy floss.
Except now it is. By adding the term “candy floss” (three times, now) I’m suddenly relevant to that topic. So Google could reasonably assume that I’m an important source of information on spun sugar. And rank me accordingly.
Ironically, the White House recently mentioned that Congress had failed to adequately support the war in Iraq. And of course, this meant they were now an authority on failure. Which in turn means–you guessed it–they’re the most relevant link for the search term. Searchengineland has the details.
So why am I on a relevance rant now?
I get alerts from Google any time the company I work for comes up online. So I was pleasantly surprised that someone had linked to Bitcurrent, specifically to an article on AJAX and web performance. Then I went and had a look.
Google Blogs Alert for: coradiant
Alistair Croll on Ajax
I have already included the most useful references in my previous posts about the performance of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), but yesterday I found this excellent blog post by Alistair Croll of Coradiant on the impact of AJAX on …
SALE - http://sa4m.iiopy.com
The site is iiopy.com; the URL prefix (sa4m) is an arbitrarily made up one. And they use nasty bits of Javascript (a onclick=”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)” target=”_blank”) to ensure that it pops up in a new window and is harder to detect than a normal link.
Anyway, this is a fake blog that picked up a post from Chris Loosely of Keynote (based on the fact that it got a decent amount of attention), and made a page for it. And since Chris’s post was entitled, “Alistair Croll on AJAX” this means that the title of the site is, yup, “Alistair Croll on AJAX.” So the first site out there with my name on it is, in fact, something that was automatically generated by a robot. It seems to be run by a company called Host Gator (who, incidentally, just launched a service to host on multiple C-class IP blocks, another way to trick search engines into thinking that a group of users is independent rather than robot-controlled.)
This is of the more insidious relevance hacks: Steal content, publish it as a blog, and wait to see who visits — then spend money on Adwords or simply use the additional hits to seem like a bigger player. Relevance hacking is a very interesting topic: A sleazy blend of math, digital underworld, dumb masses, and sham marketing.
I hate blogspam and linkjacking. There’s gotta be a business out there somewhere fixing this stuff.
