

The Future Internet is rip-off/black hat based - rarestblog
http://rarestblog.com/2009/05/the-future-internet-is-rip-offblack-hat-based-told-ya/

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zimbabwe
The Scribd tactic, mentioned in this article, is particularly shitty. Linking
to articles under Google search terms increases SEO, but it still feels dirty.

I've never heard of Twine before, but I'm writing them to tell them in advance
to bar content from my URLs. Is it a big site that I've never heard of before?
Also: How would one set up a content policy on a web site forbidding use of
the text published within? Certainly it's possible to make an attempt to
persecute these copiers?

~~~
garply
Scribd earned my permanent disdain for spamming engines with irrelevant
content. Part of it is not their fault - my browser's flash plugin is very
choosy and likes to lock up and crash my browser when their embedded pdf
loads. But combine that with the fact that I've been repeatedly misled to
their documents in the first place and I have a sort of Pavlovian response
going.

(Not that I blame the Scribd guys for this. I would use and have used similar
tactics, but it does have its costs.)

~~~
zimbabwe
They wanted to become the "Youtube for documents" and they did. Nobody that I
know of has a better docstorage method, and, like Youtube, Scribd feels cheap
and often gives me results that lied about what they were to get views. I'm
not mad at Scribd for doing that, since it worked, but I have to wonder who
would willingly demean his life's work for the sake of popularity. Perhaps
that's just my pretension speaking.

~~~
Maro
"Nobody that I know of has a better docstorage method..."

HTML.

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josefresco
This guy is thinking too small, which reflects the year he stopped spamming.
The problem is not high value keyword spam creation or even long tail spam
creation or link cramming, the next frontier is legit unique low quality
content ... and lots of it.

The stuff he's talking about is easy to spot and easy to kill, when the
content is unique and low in quality but extremely high in number, the game
changes completely.

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vaksel
What we need is an adblockplus for black hat sites.

~~~
metachris
yeah, but the big problem is who is managing the blacklists...

~~~
vaksel
UGC, a firefox tool bar that lets you flag stuff. If a user searches for
something, and the first result is bullshit, chances are they'll be pissed
enough to take the extra step to "punish" them by flagging the result

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jlees
I was linked to a ripoff site today and it took me a couple of minutes to
locate the original article - they didn't provide a backlink. I emailed them
of course, but they clearly know and do this on purpose. Makes me sad.

We get a lot of people syndicating our blogs' content and have to get AOL
legal to serve them with notices to take it down - that works, but not
everyone has such resources at their disposal.

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Maro
There's a startup specializing in tracking webspam:

<http://www.attributor.com/>

Here's the (old) TechCrunch article:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/04/attributor-launches-
ser...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/04/attributor-launches-service-to-
track-copyright-infringement-across-the-web/)

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gojomo
This is a great rant that highlights a lot of the dark side of Google's
ranking and AdSense, with respect to web quality and honesty.

It's too bad that 10 years from now, people may not be able to read this rant
to help understand the evolution of the web -- because he's blocked all robots
from visiting (including the archival robots of the Internet Archive, where I
work).

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notaddicted
This problem is related to DRM. There is no way to stop people from making
copies.

~~~
zimbabwe
There certainly is a way of stopping people from printing those copies
wholesale on their web sites. If I put up entire albums free for download on
my site, I'd have some angry bands after me.

I'm fine with the things I put online being passed around, but when a site
replicates it all and takes my traffic, it means I lose viewers and
popularity. I dislike things like FriendFeed as-is, because I don't like that
there's no way to track conversations about me online. (Somebody ought to make
a solution to this so I can give them some money.) It's much worse if they're
actually _stealing_ my writing rather than just linking back.

~~~
notaddicted
What is the way for stopping the copying, that you assert there certainly is?

If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually
wrote it? It is a judgment.

There is no way to make such a judgment without seriously violating the
usefulness and the current M.O. of the internet.

I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about
what is possible and actually happening.

~~~
zimbabwe
_If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually
wrote it? It is a judgment._

A judgment based on things like writing style analysis, which is pretty easy.
I have blogs steal my posts wholesale pretty often, and most people stealing
your writing do a really shitty job of it.

 _I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about
what is possible and actually happening._

What is actually happening is that so far nobody gives a damn about writing
enough to prevent blatant infringement. It's not an incredibly hard problem.
Youtube is solving a much harder problem with their audio/video copyright
issues, and while their solution isn't perfect it's certainly stopped me from
using them to reliably find movies and songs. The music I _do_ find there is
the sort of stuff that's not popular enough for the band to care. If they did,
those videos would be gone within hours.

Remember that there's a copyright on text just as there is on anything else.
Nobody enforces their copyrights because so far there aren't particularly huge
rip-offs that are costing writers money, but if somebody ever _does_ create
anything that's effectively leeching then suing him would be _ridiculously_
easy, since on the Internet everything is archived and most things are stored
with dates. You couldn't possibly steal one of my blog posts and get away with
claiming it's yours, and so if I care enough to go after you you have no
defense and have clearly broken the law.

~~~
Ardit20
but if _somebody_ ever does create anything that's effectively leeching then
suing him would be ridiculously easy (emphasis added)

The problem is, according to the rant, that everybody is doing it.

~~~
zimbabwe
Persecution doesn't necessarily mean a lawsuit, when it's an instantly
verifiable claim. If everybody is doing it, then it's a matter of finding and
reporting those people, and either having it removed or pressing charges
against the criminals involved. (Once it reaches that point, a lot of people
will find ways to stop ripping off writers. I hope it doesn't reach that point
any time soon.

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edw519
"I stopped doing black hat, because it backfired, I’ve seen spam everywhere I
went in the net. Often I stumbled into my own sites, when searching for
something. That bothered me a lot!"

Nice try, but somehow, I don't believe you. This just sounds like a new pitch.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Actually, no it's possible.

I did "blackhat" back in 2006 and had about 500,000 pages indexed into Google.
A few real queries and I saw my own site as the first few listings.

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omarchowdhury
P.S. I should elaborate why I saw my own listings.

The 500,000 pages that I had indexed in Google were mostly mispellings/typo
pages of the _top_ 500,000 searched keywords in terms of volume.

So you can see statistically, it's very possible to come upon your own
sites...

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srwh
It's time to create a bugtraq for black hat SEO, a strong full disclosure
group will uncover page rank exploits.

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ashot
facebook will save us.. ;)

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access_denied
Anti-ripp-off software is an emerging market.

~~~
Ardit20
perhaps so is internet law, tricky waters to surf on I think.

