Re:A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques
by mvandemar on Thursday June 17, 2010 @02:22PM
(#1439876)
There are 14 questions on a site with 308 indexed pages, such as:
http://www.starwarsanswers.com/travel-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/language-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/health-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/home-garden-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/wedding-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/dance-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/black-belt-test http://www.starwarsanswers.com/mahalo-profile
Re:A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques
by Isofarro on Thursday June 17, 2010 @04:08PM
(#1440199)
These are all empty pages. They look characteristic to pages that were not designed to be there or linked to. A bug rather than a feature.
How do you navigate to these pages from the starwarsanswers.com homepage? I don't see any of those listed on the right hand margin. Sure, they may have been exposed because of a deployment error early on that has now been fixed.
Looks to be a basic website error than something attributable to malice.
A couple days later, Bob wants to go there to check out another Star Wars question. All Bob remembers is "starwars", and fails to find the site.
Compare to "Hey Bob! I found the answer to that Star Wars question we were discussing at lunch yesterday on this great site, starwarsanswers.com".
A couple days later, Bob wants to go there to check out another Star Wars question. Bob has a good chance of remembering "starwarsanswers".
Separate domains for different topics is more friendly to users. That's probably why Google has no problem with it--as the Google guy said, its impact on users they care about.