Jul 29 2008
Automated Article Generation and Spamming Google Knol
Over at Mashable, Mark has written an article pointing out that, only three days after Knol’s release, nefarious SEO types are experimenting with ways to spam Knol:
The time for speculation as to when this will occur, though, is past. A while back I somehow got subscribed to a list belonging to a maker of splog automation software by the name of Peter Drew. He’s since moved to the semi-legitimate world of automated article creation software, but relies on very suspect methods of revenue, affiliate marketing and SEO generation to promote his software.
This morning I received the URGENT ALERT that a mere three days after the launch of Google’s Knol, he’s already created an automated Knol article generator.
I’m not sure that ‘automated article creation’ qualifies even as ’semi-legitimate’. Nonetheless, Mr. Drew has developed a piece of software colourfully named the Badass Google Knol Dominator. Here’s an introductory video:
It’s basically an automatic article submitter. Which, on the surface, doesn’t seem that problematic. However, as Mark from Mashable points out:
As you can tell, the purpose of this software isn’t to create valuable “Knol units” or to spread the altruistic dream of free knowledge for all, but to create Knols with the purpose to squat on as much namespace as possible while attempting to reap the rewards of high value links from the Google domain these articles will sit on.
Obviously spam is going to be a huge problem for Google Knol to deal with. I note, for example, that the first Knol on Digg that I found is copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on the same topic.
I don’t know much about anti-spam tactics, but I assume there are some pretty simple strategies to block tools like Mr. Drew’s. Captchas would probably be effective, as would some kind of restriction on the number of submissions per hour.
People are going to try to game Knol just as they try to game every other money or link generating site on the web. It’s just the latest chapter in an arms race between companies and the parasitical strategies people employ to exploit them. Google has lots of experience to bring to bear on the problem, so I expect they’ll do a decent (though imperfect) job of separating the wheat from the chafe.
