Another rating scam! (And a proposal on how to fix it)

Aaron Nabil (nabil@teleport.com)
Sat, 12 Oct 1996 04:33:31 -0700 (PDT)


Wanna see another indexing scam?

Try searching for "wingate" on altavista.

Or go look (briefly!) at http://www.deerfield.com/wingate/leader10.htm

Has the usual zillion repeated key words in title, invisible text, etc...

However the "interesting" feature is that they created many (>10) slightly
different pages that are keyword rich, but then dump you via "refresh" into
their "real" page. So the response screen you get from altavista has 10
abstracts, but they are all to these fake pages!

If my crawler detects any of these "ploys" it simply drops the page.

If every indexer did this then the "outsmart the robot writer" game
would be stopped cold. These people are obviously very interested in
being indexed, they'd learn very quickly.

-- 
Aaron Nabil
nabil@teleport.com