Flagrant Link Baiting

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Okay, so every month or so I do this thing at the office that we call "Fun:Tech."  (Yes, I know it is a stupid name.  I told the staff we'd change it once someone came up with something better.  No one has.)  At Fun:Tech, someone (usually me) does a quick presentation on some aspect of technology, and then we embark on an activity involving that technology.  The idea is that there's no substitute for learning by doing.  If we just relied on PowerPoint presentations to teach us about new things, we'd absorb maybe 20 percent of it, but if we actually participate in the new things, it's likely we'll remember all of it. So I put together something on GPS technology for the first Fun:Tech, and we learned about location-based services and the like, and then we went geocaching in Central Park.  Then we did a Fun:Tech about advertising and marketing in video games, and we played Wii, XBox360 and PS3 in the office for a few hours.

Last Friday, we had Fun:Tech again and I worked up a presentation on Social News.  For about 30 minutes, I presented the nuts and bolts about how sites like Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon worked, how they evolved and how valuable Social News sites are to certain content businesses (like Cracked.com and College Humor, ferinstance).  Here's the activity I structured for the "learn by doing" part...

We divided up into three teams.  Each team got a Flip HD camera.  Starting at 4 PM Friday, they had the opportunity to shoot a YouTube video, edit it and upload it.  Then they could use Social News sites to drive traffic.  At the end of one week, we'd tally up the video views and see which team got the most views, and the winning team gets to keep the Flip cameras.

The contest is going on until 4 PM today.  Here's my team's video if you want to see it.

So last night, I start seeing all the last-minute link baiting as we came into the home stretch.  (Admittedly, I did a bit of it myself, posting the video to my Facebook profile and trying to get something going on Digg...)  I got an e-mail from Porres after hours last night:

subj: devolving into Lord of the Flies here... From: Eric Porres To: Tom Hespos

Re: interns and young folk opening up tabs and tabs of browsers and making silly comments on each other’s FB status to increase rankings!

Heh.  Those cameras sure are motivating people.  Maybe a little bit too much.  This morning, I looked into some of the tactics being employed:

  • A fake "Event" on Facebook designed to get people to show up in the closing hours of the contest in order to view one team's video.
  • Commenting on, and "liking" one another's Facebook statuses and video links to increase the chances it might show up in the main feed.
  • Commenting on another team's Facebook post with a link to their own team's video, in an attempt to keep the first team from snaring incremental traffic.
  • Reaching out to friends for Diggs and upvotes on reddit, etc.

In other words, the whole thing has devolved into a link-baiting contest.  If I were anal retentive, I'd probably get upset about it, since we're supposed to really be learning about Social News.  But I'm not anal, and honestly, I think the whole thing is funny.  I can't wait to see what people are going to be doing at 3 PM...

UPDATE - I just caught Eric and Chris Tuleya (our search director) sitting in the conference room trying to launch some sort of paid campaign on Google.  So we had to set a new ground rule: NO PAID MEDIA.

UPDATE UPDATE - The last-minute link-baiting was just atrocious.  People started reaching out to influencers on the socialnets and asking them to post links.  Somebody made veiled references to a botnet.  The lack of self-respect was appalling.  In the end, though, Team Hespos was victorious with a come-from behind win.

Do No Evil, My Ass

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On March 11, I was informed by Google that this site had been removed from its index.  Here's the text of what I received:

From: Google
Subject: Removal from Google's Index
Date: March 11, 2009
To:
‹ Previous | 2 of 2 | Next ›

Recipient

Dear site owner or webmaster of hespos.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://www.hespos.com/:

Alprazolam Tafil Alprazolam And Alcohol Alprazolam Fedex Alprazolam Overnight Alprazolam Dosage Alprazolam Addiction Alprazolam Overdose Purchase Alprazolam Buy Alprazolam Online Alprazolam Xr Alprazolam Xanax 2mg Alprazolam Kill You Alprazolam Grapefruit Juice Alprazolam 25mg Alprazolam Extended Release Alprazolam Abuse Anxiety Alprazolam What Does Alprazolam Look Like Alprazolam Card Master Alprazolam Half Life Xanax Buy 2mg Alprazolam Alprazolam 2mg Picture Alprazolam And Pregnancy 2mg Alprazolam Online Pharmacy Alprazolam Buy Cheap Alprazolam Vs Lorazepam Alprazolam Degradation Photo Alprazolam Pic Acne Alprazolam Cause Alprazolam Free Prescription

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from hespos.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

It's not like this site is a commercial enterprise, but I like people to be able to find me (and certain things I've written) when they look for me on Google.  So this is kind of a big deal, but nothing Earth-shattering like losing thousands of dollars in ad revenue or anything like that.

What makes this situation infuriating is that, much like when I was a part of the AdSense program, Google likes to point out problems but not tell people where they found those problems.  If you recall, I ditched AdSense because Google sent me a similar e-mail in which they claimed they witnessed fraudulent click activity on my site but wouldn't give me specifics.   I was left wondering not just how to fix the problem, but what the problem was to begin with.  Furthermore, Google likes to keep people at arm's length and refuse to answer questions or address issues.  They want you to fix what's "wrong" and when it suits them, they might reconsider your participation in the program.  When they get around to it.

Turns out that I did spot a piece of comment spam that managed to sneak through Akismet.  It looked similar to what was identified above, and I killed it.  But it's one of tens of thousands of comment spams I get in any particular month.  The notion that if a single one happens to slide through at around the same time that Google's spiders visit my site, I could have my entire site de-listed is just plain silly.

You may recall that in 2006 I posted something about a panel I participated in at the Hyperlinked Society Conference at Annenberg.  That was the one where I asked people to consider that there was an evil side to Google's attribution of value to links, and that comment spam was a manifestation about this.  Basically, my argument was that if links have value (and they do), then there will be people who try to game the system, which presents us with a metric shitload of problems.  I took some heat from Jeff Jarvis when it came time for Q&A, and if I recall correctly, he said Google's democratization of links was the best thing to ever happen to the hyperlink.

But what about when we don't feel like participating in the arms race anymore?

Over the few years I've been blogging, I've upgraded my content management system countless times, including two major overhauls when I switched from Blogger to Movable Type and then from Movable Type to Wordpress.  I've tried countless anti-spam plugins, captcha mechanisms, and schemes to keep the comment spammers from loading up my site with ads for boner pills, Mexican pharmacies and the DRTV products du jour.  And I'm really tired of it.  I have a few choices here:

  1. Continue the arms race. Go find more anti-spam plugins.  Keep upgrading.  Let the technology distract from the content.  (Not an option anymore.  Sorry.)
  2. Turn comments off. (Not an option.  Turn comments off and it's no longer a blog.)
  3. Just let Google have its way with me. Looks like my only real option.

What's ironic about this whole situation is that comment spammers are entirely Google's creation.  If Google never devised PageRank to begin with, comment spammers wouldn't exist.  I wouldn't have spambots crawling all over it constantly, trying to find a way in to advertise boner pills.  I wouldn't have to put time into protecting my site from spam.  In a way, Google is blaming me and penalizing me for a problem IT created.  To add insult to injury, it's being standoffish about cooperating in a meaningful way toward resolving the issue.  ('Yeah, just deal with your temporary 30-day suspension.  Do a deep-dive investigation of everything on your site and just PRAY that you caught the particular thing we found on your site that we found objectionable.  Otherwise you'll have to resubmit for reconsideration.')

In conclusion...

"Do No Evil," my ass.

Trash Day

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It's Monday at 5:30 AM in Holtsville.  Trash Day. I am on my way to the train station.  It's dark, but I can see the mounds of trash and junk lining the streets.  Plastic garbage bags are piled high on plastic trash cans.  The sheer amount of waste should be enough to disgust anybody.

But what really gets me is the big stuff that people put out for collection.  Durable things.  Things that are supposed to last a lifetime - big pieces of furniture, lawn mowers, toys - stuff that no one anticipated would be in the garbage when it was bought new.

Nobody buys things that last anymore.  It's that American lust for cheap junk that fuels a lack of quality in the things we own.  As I was driving to the train station, my headlights illuminated the sea of junk lining the sides of the road.  On the left, a pile of Ikea bookshelves that probably got the job done for a couple years before it leaned over and collapsed one day.  On the right, one of those six-compartment woven basket things from Target that people use to organize junk in their bathroom.  It rusted until someone decided it was too ugly and tossed it.

Last week, my neighbor across the street threw out three bikes.  It was a day before I realized that a bunch of kids didn't simply leave their bikes at the curb, but that my neighbor was throwing the bikes out.  Against the protestations of my wife, I walked over to the opposite curb to see what kind of shape they were in.  Everything worked except the sprockets and chains, which were all rusted solid.  Probably left out in the rain for several months.  It's a shame.  Back when I was a kid, the bikes would have been picked clean for parts by kids in the neighborhood.  If I had been the lucky kid to come across them lying there, I would have spent days with my dad's wrenches taking them apart and cobbling them together.  I would have been busy for days.

No kids came to take the bikes.  The garbage man took them.

What does that say?  It's not worth it to get a new sprocket and chain for a bike when the whole bike costs $169 new at your local big box store.  It's easier to throw the whole bike out and get a new one.  The kid who spends all day taking a junk bike apart for parts would probably be ridiculed by his friends - surely there are better ways to spend valuable time.

I'm just as guilty in many cases.  I tell the checkout guy at Best Buy that I'm not interested in the extended warranty.  If it breaks, I throw it out and get a new one.  Electronics are cheap.

But I do make an effort to buy things that last.  Yesterday, I spent most of the day packing up my music gear in my basement.  Most of it is top of the line - stuff I've had since I was 15 and that is still durable and coveted today.  Head out to my shed and you'll see that every piece of equipment I have is built to last, from the lawn mower to the rototiller to the pressure washer.  Everything is well-maintained and gets new oil and plugs regularly.  Everything has a Honda motor and starts on the first or second pull every time.

Maintenance helps, but it would be a bigger help if the consumer economy didn't prioritize price over value every time.  Judging from the trash piles outside my neighbor's homes, many of them would rather pay $129 for the junky plastic push mower than $199 for the stainless steel one with the Honda motor that will last me until I'm too old to push a mower.  They'll throw theirs out and buy a new one every three years.  I'll change oil and plugs and pass my mower on to my kid.  (My grandfather gave me a Snapper mower when I was in my teens.  It worked like a dog for him for over a decade and for us for several years.  It died only when my mom put regular gas in it instead of pre-mix and it seized.)

Furniture is another story.  You can't avoid cheap furniture these days.  Even expensive furniture is cheaply made.  My wife and I bought our bedroom set when we moved into our house on Spiral Road, and I've already had to repair the bed frame twice and send back one of the dressers for a replacement.  It's not like we went to Ikea.  This is supposedly decent Broyhill furniture.  When the bed frame broke, I saw it wasn't even real wood - just laminate cover God-knows-what.  Maybe the next time we need furniture we'll take a big truck down to Georgia or the Carolinas where they still make real furniture out of real wood.

We might not get a chance.  While we demand cheap stuff from everybody around us, people are demanding cheap stuff from whatever line of business we happen to be in ourselves.  Everybody pays $200 for that?  Well, I want to pay $100.  What can you do for me?

We all end up reducing the quality of what we do and what we sell.  And we forget what value looks like when we do see it.  The people making solid products and offering solid services suffer - why do something once for $200 when it can be done every year for $100 every time?  Most people line up to pay the $100 so they can do it again in six months or a year, rather than pay the $200 to do it once - the right way.

Taking the cheap way every time leads to a lot of frustration and waste.  Piles of trash on the curb.  Things that ought to be reconditioned going in the landfill instead.  Until all we're left with is a pile of junk.