an idea to spoil spammers “work”

I’m game. (yes, pun intended)

Cool. Posted.

I’ve had a few questions about this, so I updated my page with more details and explanations.

Sooooo……….. if we made a link cat called “spamcrap”, we could do this:

<ul>
<li id="spamcrap">Spamcrap
<ul><?php wp_get_links(11); ?></ul>
</li>
(where (11) is the cat id)

and in the css

#nav#spamcrap,
#nav#spamcrap a,
#nav#spamcrap, a:hover {
color: same as page background;
}

So we can have these links, and Google sees them, but we do not.

This a goer ?

(Note: pre-coffee thought !)

::blink:: Please let me not be the only one that didn’t understand the above…! (No offense, Podz.)

Ozh is proposing that we all link to wikipedia for spammer junk stuff, which I think is a fine idea. But, I’d rather not have a visible link to the online poker people because that still gives them human visibility as well as Google reading them.

So doing the above means you could have a list of 10 links, but as they would be the same colour as the page background, no-one else would see them but Google still does.

Oh.

Tried it – it works.

New category called ‘spamcrap’ (it has an id of 18)

in sidebar.php:
<li id="spamcrap">Spamcrap
<ul><?php wp_get_links(18); ?></ul>
</li>

in my css:
#nav ul li#spamcrap, #nav li#spamcrap a, #nav li#spamcrap a:hover, #nav#spamcrap a:visited {
color: #fff;
}

And now, at the bottom of my sidebar is the link.
It reacts to mouseover (and even that could be stopped) – but even so the link is good – and Google will get a good look, but you can’t see it.

Excellent idea Ozh !

Podz, you could as well give them visibility: hidden or even display: none, I think Googlebot would still see them.

Except that if a reader sees :
Online Poker [?]
on your page (or whatever link to explanations), he is more likely to get what it’s all about and join the effort ??

Well, I’ve done it. And I suggested that someone (I don’t have the skill) track and graph the Wikipedia page’s ranking to see whether we are having any impact.

I would urge caution with this, folks: most of the leading search engines do not look favourably on sites which include hidden links, invisible to end users. Whether or not you are doing it for a noble purpose, this is still a deliberate attempt to offer one thing to the search engine and another thing to the end user, and in the context of building search indexes, this is called spam.

Just my tuppence,
Greg

Greg is right. From Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
Avoid hidden text or hidden links

If you don’t hide links or text, you avoid that risk.

Hmm… with what I have right now (I haven’t removed the link or css) all Google will see is a correctly markedup site. Yes I am using a CSS technique to colour some text / link but I cannot see that Googlebot would look at my links, look at the css, compare the background colour of #nav with the colour of the link, then make a decision about visibility (I could be using a pale yellow) and then make another decision about whether or not to use the link or demote me.
If every site were correctly marked up – maybe I’d give the bot some credit toward the idea, but as it is ? No, I cannot see that what I have is going to upset Googlebot / Google at all.

What I do agree with is Ozh’s suggestion about getting others to do the same. I may well set up a link cat purely for Wikipedia links and include both my favourite links, new stuff and the spamcrap too.

Either way, I think Ozh’s principle is sound – not only do we stop their spam, we counter their efforts too.

Ok, the thing has really begun : last night Googlebot indexed the page, so hopefully the pages linked as well (a few posts and trackbacks). Let’s wait and see how it goes in ranking now ??

w00t ! 3 days later, the page on Wikipedia about Online Poker went from rank 800+ to … #30 in Google !