A lot of spam on the site today, for some reason. Meanwhile, the Google alert spamming idiocy continues in the blogosphere. I mentioned this approach a few days ago: the spammer sets a Google alert for the term learning Chinese. Whenever he sees a blog post on the topic he goes in and spams the unwitting blogger, while pretending to be a helpful, objective commentor. This one is a beauty in its duplicity. (Note the anonymity and the suggestion to take care. There are plenty more, but I’ll leave it at one example!)
These fools give blogging a bad name. It seems to me to be a clear sign of loserdom to engage in it, but it increases each day. Sigh.
Ken Carroll
Do you have Akismet Ken?
Ken,
Besides the spamming practice, the main features of the website are no original content.
Their “Learn Chinese for Free” is actually Dr. Xie´s Conversational Chinese Online
http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/ccol/content.htm
Their “Chinese Writing” course is copy&paste from Sinophilia.
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo.....ittura.htm
It seems to be very easy to develop a Chinese website nowadays with the use of these powerful key combinations: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
Finally, maybe we shouldn´t give them and others like them that much notoriety. Accusing them from your popular website may mean just giving them extra publicity. While they lack creativity and ethics, although they may get some traffic at first, they will not be able to sustain theirselves in the long term, so I believe time alone will prove them doomed to fail.
To see it from “their” angle:
Running a Chinese learning related website must be extremely frustrating. No matter how good it gets, no matter how much effort one puts into it. ChinesPod.com is ALWAYS mentioned glowingly in the press, and their own little mostly pathetic website never.
From ChinesePod.com’s view I would probably find this quote by a famous German politician appropriate:
“Was kümmert es die Eiche wenn sich die Sau dran scheuert”
Fox,
Interesting proverb.
Here’s my philosophy: I want to build the best online resource that I possibly can. We may or may not be achieving that (a matter of opinion, I guess). However, it is the community that makes everything happen. If you respect the community, you’ll receive respect in return and you may get the chance to build a great service around it. Spamming the people you want to attract just doesn’t make any sense. It’s the equivalent of strip mining, but without any return on the effort. Nobody benefits from it, so I really don’t know wh ythey do it!
Ken Carroll
ACTIONABLE - Here’s a slight rub Ken. You’ve given this spammer and the previous site from Olive probably some of the best publicity they’ll ever get. Also, as you provide links to their site, Cpod’s credibility in search engine rankings also gives their search rankings a nice boost. Plus you’ve buried their link in real text, another boost to how the engines will evaluate that link. In-bound links, they are like net gold. So doesn’t it make sense for them to continue?
In contrast, what avenues have you shared with other, let’s say more commericial sites that would like to collaborate with Cpod? There’s no Link Page in the Cpod site, their is no place for ads, etc. Do you create a walled compound (Microsoft, gated-communities) or an open marketplace? (Google, Yahoo, multi-use zoning, open front lawns)
There is almost no dis-incentive either positive or negative to change the behavior. Trust, openeness, respect: too fuzzy for the nitty gritty pavements. Strip mining made some people very very wealthy.
Lantian,
All true about giving people more attention than they deserve, but less important, I think, than the freedom to talk about it. (By extension, you’re comments also promote the spammers agenda, by prolonging the discussion, but again, this is not, to my mind, the point.)
Ken Carroll
since 90% of the posts on this blog are from 20 or so people (my guess), most registered users of CPod (looks like), why not use their login credentials to identify them and review all other submission before posting? Yeah, not so entirely free for all anymore but how big an issue would this be?
Yv
STICKY - Hi Ken,
Actually prolonging the discussion doesn’t do much for the spammers. The search engines aren’t yet smart enough to place a ranking value on ‘length’ of the discussion, or if we really are talking sensibly!
What does help the spam-site are those links you provided to their sites which is embedded in your blog entry. Since the links are coming from a valid site, Cpod, and not some link farm or other junk-mail site, the search engines think you ‘recommend’ those sites.
Anyway, except for Bazza’s suggestion of Akismet, I’d say maybe now that a few of us have looked at the site and seen no original content there, why not update your comment and take out the http://www part so a reader would have to manually re-type it if they really want to go look, and a search engine won’t take it as a referral link.
In your honor, yesterday I ripped off the last few digits on a few of those pesky ‘get a job, ID’ stickers that get plastered all over the place in China.
In the ‘good ol days was there spam? Online and offline? Maybe that’s why shoes were invented.
Ken:
Here’s my two bits: I have to agree with Lantian and Fernando above. The first thing I did when you posted the site was to “check it out”. I know, I’m a sinner! However, I do agree with you Ken that it lacks business ethics.
One of the comments above mentioned above mentioned there is nothing original at these sites. This may be true. On the other hand, (this is an honest poke, no offense intended), I hope Chinese Pod doesn’t claim that all the tools on your website originated with you. For instance, ‘pop up’ definitions were around a long time before Pod. As I said, this isn’t meant to defend these guys. It’s an honest comment I think.
I also couldn’t resist checking out that site, and it appears to be a site that links to other sites, including to ChinesePod’s trial sign-up page with an affiliation id of 131. I don’t understand how these things work, but since I don’t know any better, my impression is that you’re paying them to send you paying customers … no?
The page he links to on his main page is http://www.chinesepod.com/afflanding.php?affid=131
Lantian,
ChinesePod isn’t actually giving these spam sites any kind of Google boost, thanks to the attributes ChinesePod uses in its hyperlinking, which nullifies the link (at least for Google).
Guelph,
You’re correct. We use the ‘no follow’ function, so the link does not count. With a Google page rank of 7, a link from us would be quite valuable otherwise.
Ken Carroll