The X-Plane Plugin Wiki used to have no login requirements - anyone could just click and edit. All was good for a while, and then I logged in one day to find some of the most highly used pages stuffed to the gills with the phrase "Nigritude Ultramarine" over, and over, with links to other sites.
You can read about this phrase, why it was invented and what was going on here.
Our response was to put a user login requirement on the site, and we haven't had a spam problem since (knock on wood) although we do seem to get what appear to be bogus signup requests. (They don't really hurt anything, they just clog the user database. I'm not sure why anyone would sign up if they don't intend to actually do anything.) But a few thoughts on Nigritude Ultramarine and people's attempts to get junk spam sites into the top of Google's search listing:
- I was pleased to see a real site (this FAQ) as the number two search hit for the term...this real link from a real blog to them can be sort of a contribution to their page rank.
- I have faith that Google will continue to fight the technology arms race against seach engine optimizers...Google has gobs of money and an immense motivation to do so.
- Apparently link farmers, in an attempt to raise their page rank, have been using bots to automatically steal blog content. I haven't seen this myself yet and I've never had an X-Plane query go to a junk site. But some blogs I read have complained of this happening.
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