After a quick run through our own lists, and then looking at directory owners on DP and what they have to offer... I'm absolutely amazed that most "directory owners" still don't understand what spam is. Quick question: Do you consider this a spam listing? If the answer is yes, why would so many of you list it? That's just 1 example, I could offer literally thousands, and they all have the same spammy characteristics, but people are still listing them. WHY? Do you not listen? Do you ignore Google penalising your site with the Penguin update? Do you ignore Google specifically saying they are targeting sites listing webspam? You cannot list websites like that if you wish to be a directory. Please, call yourself something else. Link farm, Spammer, Google Adsenser. Whatever you like. But you are NOT a directory owner if you list spam. Directory Owners MUST be able to edit listings and reject spam.
I am running a classifieds, and I tell you fighting spam is tough. With thousands of submissions a day tracing spam becomes even tougher. If you go to craigslist, you will see that a huge amount of ads on it is nothing but spam. The only hope is that people who visit my classifieds will be mature enough to see the difference between good and bad ads. And trust me I delete hundreds of spam ads a day and hundreds of them are stopped by the spam filter - it's an ongoing "war".
Spam is a natural, whether its a field of cultivation or in web with sites that are for submission/ listing. The only thing you can make your system strong against spam (manual or automated process) to minimize. The more you keep quality contents the more site value will increase.
It's a good question. Will you reject money that someone want to pay you? If no, you should forget the "spam" matter.
Yes every time, and often it's a featured link because a submitter knows his site doesn't adhere to the guidelines and thinks the higher payment will make a difference. But it's self-serving because I find better quality sites are submitting to categories with sites they're happy to be neighbours with. Spammers will look for sites that already contain spam, so if yours does you're on a slippery slope.
I guess I'm just weird. If the site isn't one that I would link to from my personal site, it's not one I will accept in my directories. Even if the site is in my niche, was submitted with a good description and otherwise followed my TOS, if I don't see something worthwhile about it, I don't accept it. Doesn't matter to me that they are willing to pay for the link/advertising either.
Thats why i never charged for my directories and relied on good adsense returns... I wanted the final call on editing and approval
Actually I found that charging actually slowed down and all but eliminated the riff raff and crap or spammy listings.
The simple answer is: because they can. And your job as a developer is to filter it out. The first rule of any application developer: never trust anything user inputs, ever.
I have never had one objection to me changing the Title or Description. And the instances of me changing a submission would be over 90%. Maybe they don't send business my way again
To me a spam are most likely an unsolicited submission, no spammer would ever pay to submit, on the other hand, a submitter might submit a page of some product and he/she is willing to pay for an inclusion. If the title is 25000 Unsecured Loans , I'm fine with that, having it repeated over and over that's not cool at all, guess being a human editor will have to work to make sure it does not look spammy.
I must agree with all of you. I think they should avoid from spamy directories. Google penguin has clearly mentioned, these kind of submissions are harmful for your site.
I Also Consent to This, I run a Blogger Blog Directory and do get such spammy listing and what i do about such is either email the submitter for some corrections or i ignore their listing and don't include it on the Directory. Getting ones Directory organized and knowing what can be added to it and what shouldn't and keeping to this is what Directory owners need to do to curb spamming on their directories.
One key point to remember too is that not all sites listed in directories that are spammy start out that way. Some are legit sites that after a period of time either do not get renewed, domain changes hands, or simply go out of business and end up being renewed for some other purpose. It's important to recognize sites that go dormant and then come back as something else in your directory. I've seen cases where a legit site changes hands and is rebranded as some other business that is also legit, but belongs in a new category now. So it gets moved. For the most part the ones that go dormant and come back either end up as godaddy landing pages or some other domain registrar's landing page, or are rebranded into something spammy and unrelated. Those sites get deleted.
This is why directory owners should periodically be auditing their listings. Sure, it's a daunting task but it's better than linking to a bunch of off topic, domained sites or porn.
This situation is ok. In terms of websites, any website, can have dead outbound links, or links to sites who were once great but dropped or were sold etc. Matt Cutts has even touched on this, and if you think about it in reasonable terms, sure sites are going to have some dead links till they clear the clutter. As an example... I did a blog post recently where I found that the #1 spot on Google for a particular search was occupied by an expired domain. Because of it's size this thing would happen a lot on Google, as it crawls and deindexes/deranks those sites who die, disappear, etc. At the time I thought "what the hell is google doing ranking that as #1", but the site itself could've had useful information prior to the domain expiring so, after thinking some more about it, I figured that this was fairly reasonable. To Google's credit within 7 days the expired domain had disappeared from the results. It's a process of constantly auditing/maintaining the content so that it remains fresh... That sort of content that you don't control (the actual website itself that is being linked to) is a far different prospect to the content that you DO control (i.e. the listing itself on your directory and the information that goes with it). It's the content that you DO control that is the problem here in terms of spam. Letting listings in with spammy information, where that information becomes content on your site, has no excuse. If it's spammy why is it listed? The information itself needs to be edited such that it suits the directory. If the website is great, but the submission information is spammy, and you list it as is, then you've created spam OR allowed spam to propagate OR have done nothing to prevent spam. If you have the control to prevent the spam, you MUST use it, otherwise you are no better than the spammers.
To add to this, its most likely just an affiliate site, although trying to appear UK focused its a domain registered in India, the language tells you that before even using a whois site.
Yes. This link is spam. I have also spam like this: Title:Limo puzzle URL: hssp://www.san-antonio-limo.com/ Desc. Solve a fun and challenging interior limousine puzzle to win. Category: software and from .ru domains, so I like it 'remove as spam' option.