Digg Poaching: The Sordid Underbelly of Web 2.0 Promotion
One of the most difficult problems for all webmasters is spam. Whether you are a blogger fighting comments, a search engine fighting doorway pages, or Digg fighting vote manipulation, spam is a serious concern. Unfortunately, the treatments for spam are often very painful and present numerous false positives – a CAPTCHA too difficult to solve, an IP filter that tags large office buildings, or a spam trap that filters good comments. When these treatments become too strong, especially on “democratic” Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Reddit, they provide spammers with easy targets. Virante nor I condone this kind of tactic, nor do we condone this kind of experimentation on an unwilling subject. That being said, the compelling and important nature of...
The Strongest Cloaking Yet – Cross Domain Canonical Tag
For years the most advanced forms of bot detection, ip delivery, javascript and flash obfuscation, etc. have been employed by blackhat search engine optimizers to accomplish cloaking. These techniques, when used successfully, would allow the webmaster to pull the wool over the eyes of bots and feed sales-heavy (or worse) content to end users. Google has fought valiantly to stop these techniques and, by and large, has removed all but the most sophisticated techniques. However, they have fallen on their own sword with the introduction of the new cross-domain canonical tag. The Canonical Tag The rel=canonical tag was a god-send for most webmasters. It allowed us to defeat duplicate content issues by placing a single line of code at the top of the HTML page,...
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