Comments on: “Get a free Link from Wired” was a Stupid Headline

by: Doug Heil

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:44:40 +0000

Comments, yes it does. But that’s not my point and you know it Danny. ANY self-promotional article written by anyone, no matter how crappy it is can get voted to the front page of sphinn.com and be there with a very clear and very direct link, withOUT the nofollow tag. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. You also know exactly what I mean. Do YOU vouch/recommend every link that is submitted? Does Wired? The answer is clearly no. To say your site uses the nofollow tag is laughable. Calling out another site not using nofollow is just not acceptable in many eyes, and for many reasons.

by: Danny Sullivan

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:02:02 +0000

Sphinn uses nofollow, Doug. That should be covered in our help files; it was discussed before and after we instituted it (see the New Features thread), and you can look at links to see it. We use it in comments. There was a bug where it wasn’t applied to some copy-and-paste links, and I think it was too hard to go back and apply it to comments before it was brought in — about three months worth.

by: randfish

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:37:28 +0000

This blog post (and a similar one from another source) are pure hypocrisy, crass negative link (and attention) baiting and feed off the natural draw of drama on the Internet. For shame, John. To think I had respected you, invited you to events and even recommended your services. On occasion, your posts and comments have made me question your integrity or worry that my respect for you was unfounded. Here, you’ve sealed the deal.

“Trashy sensationalism that crossed ethical borders for the sake of short term audience attention grabbing”

Repulsive, derisive filth (and obvious hypocrisy). Disgusting.

by: IncrediBILL

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:52:32 +0000

Can’t edit typo, I meant to say…

IMO, Danny closed one very prominent source of POTENTIAL spam and the big fuss is Wired was ticked about having egg on their face so now it’s a fiasco.

by: IncrediBILL

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:34:44 +0000

Anyone that thinks the spammers weren’t already eyeballing and using Wired are naive because Danny wouldn’t have found that spammy page if the spammers didn’t already know about the site.

FWIW, I posted something over a year ago pointing people to all the wide open wiki’s and tiki’s of the world hoping people would clean up their act.

Anyone can find them with a simple Google search such as “inurl:/wiki viagra” or “inurl:/tiki cialis” and so on and so forth.

Some sites I specifically exposed did fix the problem, some didn’t, and those didn’t that were already being spammed are still being spammed, no harm no foul, because any BH spamming idiot with a fundamental understanding of Google search would’ve found them in 2 seconds anyway.

Did I do anything bad?

Of course not because the spammers already knew about those sites before I did, just like they knew about it before Danny did.

IMO, Danny closed one very prominent source of spam and the big fuss is Wired was ticked about having egg on their face so now it’s a fiasco.

With that said, John is also correct in that a very good resource of raw links is also lost, but you can’t have it both ways. It can be a spam free wide open resource with NOFOLLOW or it can be a spam haven without it.

Come on people, use those brains, I know they still function at some base level…

@Bill: Thanks for the comment. I don’t lament the loss of a link source. I regret the bully behavior put forth by first the search engines and now the search marketers. The link spammers seem to be blind to the real web, where most content is still legitimate and most back links are still genuine. That’s fine, and they can live in their own world of nofollow and paid linking schemes, but when they start to impose their religion on everyone else (by, for example, pointing at open systems and saying “hey! free links for the grabbing!”) someone has to speak up. I did.