Parasites linking to p2pnet

p2pnet news Advertising | P2P:- wtf is this?
I’m noticing more and more links from sites which have sod-all to do with topics or issues p2pnet covers.
The owners must in some way be making money out of it. Otherwise, why bother? And frankly, it’s really starting to piss me off.
Keeping p2pnet online is, for me, an often stressful, month-by-month exercise and I really resent ‘Wood Hudson High Footboard Beds King’ and ‘Deluxe Magic Cloths For Enviro Steamer Model 370′ and ‘Kirby G5 Wall Ceiling Brush’ somehow cashing in on stories I spend hours each day posting.
Every now and then I see a link to a site which, in its own right, is interesting and I turn it into a post. But that’s getting harder and harder to do because genuine links are being swamped by garbage such as the screenshot on the right.
I have enough trouble keeping up with relevant items to want to waste time posting the URLs of these link sites and the companies they advertise, even if I could keep up with with them, there are so many.
But I would, at least, like to know how these parasites benefit from attaching themselves to p2pnet.
Many (most) of them don’t even appear to have links to p2pnet, even though they show up on the WordPress Incoming Links list.
Does anyone know how this works?
Cheers! And thanks …
Jon - p2pnet at shaw dot ca
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May 10th, 2008 at 10:12 am
It could have something to do with the celebrity stories Jon, unfortunately the thing that brings more folks to the site here is the same thing that will bring those types of otherwise mundane sites users.
Lets hope you can feed their need for celeb gossip and maybe get then educated about the rights and wrongs of the P2P scene at the same time.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am
… alternatively you could be a victim of the bandwidth stealing scheme adopted by many anti-p2p organisations as a semi legitimate tactic to increase your operating costs etc, I,m not sure which scenario suits your views but our site suffers a similar problem with what we suspect are bots downloading a peice of free software 3-400 times each day and I,m not talking just a few at a time, a day can equal over a Gigabyte in wasted bandwidth.
It seems some anti-p2p folks will resort to any low trick, a bit like their masters.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I’m sorry to hear about this, Jon. Is it possible for you to configure your site to reject links from these domains & IP addresses? Of course, it would be an ongoing job to keep blocking new ones as they come up, but it might reduce this problem down to a manageable level.
Perhaps you could get one of your helpers to look after this task?
May 10th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I think it’s the next battle in the SEO war. First, Google invented page rank, and rated sites on incoming links. The parasites developed link farms to boost their rating. Google must have responded by detecting sites that only link to each other, and ranking them down. I think what you’re seeing is an attempt not to be seen as a link farm; by linking to a popular site, they are attempting to bypass the link farm detection algorithm. You could alert Google to this, but they probably know. What I can’t work out, is whether there’s any disadvantage to you in all this. On the plus side, it’s giving you incoming links for free! On the downside, it’s polluting the search space with irrelevant terms. I seem to remember you have an unhappy relationship with Google, but if your account was pulled with no reason given, you could try asking them if it was in any way related to these parasite sites. Hey, I think I’ve invented a new word… “para-sites”
I bet someone got there first…
May 10th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Wotcha Andy:
“attempting to bypass the link farm detection algorithm”
Would this kind of spamming tactic achieve that?
Meanwhile, Google assumes p2pnet and all the other sites in the same boat are guilty as charged without wanting to listen to us, so it’s doubtful if they’d respond at this point. But you never know.
Cheers! And thanks …
May 11th, 2008 at 1:49 am
“Would this kind of spamming tactic achieve that?”
i think by linking to credible sites such as this one, they can pretend to be a legitimate, so googles bots wouldn’t notice the inter-linking as much as if it was on its own… pretty much just flooding the bot with proper links, so it doesnt notice the bad ones. Unfortunatly, the reason these are showing on your list is probably because googles bots are verifying that they are indeed real links, and not just random garbage that some bots may spit out… so it probably is detremental, both in your ranking with google, and with bandwidth usage… of course i could be WAY off here, im just speculating based on what other people have said and my… mediocre… knowledge of the internet, haha
btw google cancelled my adsense account with them for no reason aswell. bastards.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I bet there may also be links to those same sites buried deep in P2Pnet’s old reader posts. Then the circle will be complete and the Googlefarm will bump up the Google search ranking of those sites.