Has anyone stopped to ask whether this is really worth it to the SEO? In terms of labor and cost/benefit? Suppose for discussion that this works. At most, it puts a very small part of an extremely well known website slightly lower in the rankings. I doubt it's a valid assumption that if some unknown site is number 3 in the rankings and WP dips down to number 4, large numbers of people who would otherwise have gone to the most popular reference site on the Internet will migrate to the unknown site. Brand value counts for something. When I'm browsing Google News and *The New York Times* appears fourth in the listings while a small town newspaper pops up at third, I'm still more likely to click on the *Times* article. Especially if I'm in a hurry. -Durova On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

Durova wrote: In that world, it's a non-issue. For one thing, neither the SEO's nor the suckers who buy their services are the sharpest knives in the drawer. (If they were sharper, they wouldn't have to be bottom-feeders.) And if an SEO can say, "I guarantee to improve your search engine rankings", and if he can convince suckers to pay him to do so, then it *is* worth it to him, regardless of whether he actually improves his customers' hit rates (or even whether he actually improves their rankings).

Simplest to find that (almost trivially simply) with a db query - I suggest seeing if there is a developer who doesn't mind running one. FT2 wrote:

On 11/26/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, especially if WP has an article which describes your goods or services as fraudulent. 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.