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zag
13-04-2002, 06:53/06:53AM
Editors Take A Bite Out Of Spam! (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2002/4/prweb36813.php)

I think our next press release will be about "Google Backlinks to GoGuides" that dvduval and tlpretender have been talking about in another thread.
ihelpyou
13-04-2002, 08:14/08:14AM
I am very impressed. Great job!

A question:
In addition--behind the scenes--Goblin continues to be honed as a powerful weapon against spam. Goblin is the GoGuides community spider-like program whose sole task in life is to wander around the GoGuides database looking for bad links, redirects, doorways, slow-loading pages, and spam. GOBLIN is also capable of reading the content of websites and comparing that information with other sites already listed in the directory which helps prevent mirror sites in the directory. When GOBLIN locates these and other sites in the database it feels are questionable it automatically flags the url which alerts editors in the topic of possible problems with the site.
When a site is flagged and labeled as spam, does the owner get a chance to 'clean' it up? The reason I ask this is because many owners/sites have NO clue that what they did is spam. Sometimes they were led by advice given by someone, led by a SPam SEO person, or simply did not know.

Do you contact this site? If not, you should have very clear guidelines spelled out on the submission page of what you don't want in the directory. You might already have this somewhere as I have not looked carefully.



BTW, because Google is recognizing links in your directory, etc, it is very clear that GoGuides will be viewed as a valuable link to many, especially as the word gets out more and more. It is very good you have this spam policy. If more directories had this, AND inforced it, the spam people out there would be forced to go underground even more than they are now. Simply keep inforcing it and don't let up. :)
tlpretender
13-04-2002, 09:57/09:57AM
For the most part, at least for myself, there has not been a real need to contact the site. Many times Goblin just flagged our own errors. Many 404's can be corrected by just correcting the url, etc.

Also, to not penalize owner's for taking their sites down while working on them, the site had to be a 404 for a while to be flagged. Even then, the site is not removed from the directory. It is simply put into a none public portion of the directory. If the site goes live again, it would be unflagged and returned to the proper public topic listing.

Multiple listings of the same information, like:
url.com/
url.com/index1.htm
url.com/index2.htm
url.com/index3.htm
url.com/index4.htm

Other than the fact that most of these turn out to be porn, we remove the extra pages and leave just the main url. From then on, if url.com/index1.htm is resubmitted it is just shown as a duplicate submission.
ihelpyou
13-04-2002, 11:11/11:11AM
Oh, okay. You do not flag sites if they have some <body> spam. Then I see what you are doing. You should also remove sites that have hidden test, hidden links, etc. :)
tlpretender
13-04-2002, 11:42/11:42AM
If it doesn't effect the content of a site, hidden text, etc. wouldn't effect a directory as it would an SE. It's the redirects, etc that would dilute a directory.