[WikiEN-l] How to sabotage Wikipedia, for SEO spammers

[Charlotte Webb]

On 11/26/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at 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.