On 11/26/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
If WP is #1 or #2 and your spamvertisment is #4 you can increase your income greatly by getting WP delisted even if you can do nothing to improve the position of your site.
Yes, especially if WP has an article which describes your goods or services as fraudulent.
There are far more effective techniques that these SEO scummbags have not figured out yet.
Might be better not to list them here and now but I imagine there are some software changes which could be made in the near future to be more able to counter these attacks whenever they do occur (rather than a couple of programmer-months later).
For example I know edits which add [[wiki-links]] pointing to a specific page can be seen in (but not filtered from) the inverted "related changes" page. But for the technique described in this thread it would be helpful to have some way to track removal of incoming links.
Something less tedious than comparing the current whatlinkshere to a saved whatlinkshere list from last week (which would require anticipating the attack).
On a side note something like this for mysteriously emptied categories would be helpful too.
Surely at least some of the edit/behavior patterns of the other tactics you allude to would be more easily recognized by a bot watching recentchanges than by a human stumbling upon a user with a couple strange and not obviously related edits.
If you know the game already you are an a good position to prevent successful play of it. Match and exceed, as their mantra says.
—C.W.