It being too hot to do anything outside, I got back into the swing of bringing old blog posts in here, from February 2005. One in particular seems worth bringing to life. Take back the net is about a crazed scheme to game search engines by encouraging bloggers1 to add the words Online Poker to their blogroll but -- and here's the crazy part -- to link to the Wikipedia entry for Online Poker.2 Back then, Ozh wrote:
If a million bloggers do so, game over for casino spammers, no one will ever get first rank. Vain, futile, but delicious revenge. Spread the word!
So I did it, and I spread the word, and today I checked DDG and the Wikipedia entry stood at number 5, which is OK.
Ozh identified the problem like this:
You have a blog. You like it, you're devoting time and energy to it. And everyday, you're being utterly infuriated by casino spammers messing with your comments, your trackbacks, your referrers logs, hostages and victims in their pathetic race to top Page Rank.
And if you're living in a silo, you may think the problem has been solved. After all, you can just ignore the crap that their algorithms inject into your stream and site. Just one of the reasons I use those things as little as possible.
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