This is a great post from the MIT Advertising Lab blog. The blogger, unnamed, found a site that had ripped off his content and blatantly used it for the sole purpose of making a few bucks off of AdSense on Yet Another Spam Blog. But the MIT blogger used his wits to refresh the offending blog's page every 5 seconds so as to dilute the click to views ratio of the AdSense ads and get the site banned from AdSense.

Admittedly our MIT AdLab blogger knows someone can do the same thing to him without him being able to do a thing about it, but in his own words...

"oh well, I'll take solace in being original."

I'm all about someone using a simple hack like the automated url refresher tool to take down a spammer, especially since the person shared their hack with all of us for our enjoyment and enrichment.

I also like the fact that this hack can be performed by any non-technical do-gooder out there that wants to take a bite out of spam. No matter how many spam blogs are out there, there will never be more spam blogs than there are users on the internet. So perhaps we should organize the Take A Bite Out Of Spam Blogs campaign and equip all the righteous internet users with a tool that allows them to report the spam blog [other than just spam blogs on a single network like blogger] and unleash a url-refreshing mechanism located on a server grid pretty cheaply.

Insert Dr. Evil laugh here.

From the original MIT blog...

I felt special yesterday. It was the first time someone has ripped my blog's content and tried to use it for personal gain by pasting it on a different page surrounded by AdSense ads. Somehow it always happens to the big guys, but not to your regular rank-and-file blogmonkey. But now I felt flattered - the guys even pasted "MIT Advertising Lab" across their clone. Since I don't publish a whole lot of original thinking and rely mostly on re-blogging other people's work, seeing my own contribution's value in filtering and organizing instead of production, I normally wouldn't mind a whole lot. I got peeved, though, because I didn't get a single courtesy link back from the guys, and decided to let them know they needed to play nice.

I've been talking to a few people, and I have a strong suspicion that
these redirect urls will go away in the next few days.

Big hat tip to my buddy Pete on this one. Pete pointed out to me that it was kind of weird Google was using a redirect url in their blog search results. The redirected url looks something like this...

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.marketingshift.com/

With a url like that you can't get the important information out of your referrer logs like "This visitor was sent from Google's blog search and not from Google's normal results..." Pete's hypothesis is that they simply forgot to take the redirect urls off when they moved their blog search into beta and out of testing. I personally think this makes a lot of sense. Here's why...

1.) Google was likely testing this blog search engine for a long time. Rumors of Google launching a blog search engine had been around for over a year so we were all expecting them to launch it but in order to test it they couldn't let the cat out of the bag on their latest and greatest search tool so they implemented these quirky redirect urls.

2.) With all of their concern over serving up accurate results, I'm sure the last thing on their mind was seeing what redirect urls were being used in the actual results. I'll have to check with Matt on this one though.

Here's an example of the headers returned clicking on a google blog search redirect url result.

HTTP/1.0 403 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.marketingshift.com/
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=be0c6601b78c5e2b:
TM=1126725733:LM=1126725733:S=S1EijWdUb6tc8f3W;
expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/;
domain=.google.com
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 1294
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:22:13 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive

As you can see they're not putting any of the relevant information like keywords used, page result was clicked on, number of results per page, the fact this result came from google's blog search engine and not google's normal search results.

So did Google make a booboo? Did they forget to pull the test redirect urls out of the result sets before they launched blog search? I'm not sure but I bet we can find out.

I've been wondering when they would get around to launching a blog only search engine. Now the wondering and waiting is finally over. I love that you can subscribe to the rss or atom feeds of the results instead of having to wade through layers of complexity via another API. Simplicity is better.

Google Blog Search Results
Haven't had much time to dig into any hows and whys of their blog search implementation but that will come soon. For now the results are fairly relevant and it appears that having a blogger blog will definitely help out with your indexing since they have a local copy of your blog on their servers and know when it's updated without having to sick a crawler on the site.

More later.

One of my daily reads is Raymond Camden's blog. He's a ColdFusion developer who's given away more code in his lifetime than the rest of corporate America ever will. He also lives in Louisiana, which in case you've been living in a bat cave for the past month, was just hit by hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is no longer around. Well Ray posted an email he received from Google's AdSense department asking if there was anything they could do to help him during this time. Although it's not a huge deal it does show they are actually thinking about their Louisiana publishers and know there may be some issues since part of the state has been devastated. Here's the contents of the email he received from Google's AdSense department. It lends itself to some good viral marketing.

Hello,
We've noticed that your AdSense payment address is located near the area most impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We also know you may have issues more urgent than your AdSense activities right now, so we'd like to offer our help.

If you're having trouble managing your AdSense account in any way, please let us know. We can assist you with holding your payments, updating your payment address, switching to electronic payments, or any other account issues you may have.

Please feel free to reply to this email or contact us at adsense-support@google.com to let us know if there's anything else we can do for you.

We offer our deepest sympathy during these difficult times.

Last week I asked Niall Kennedy of Technorati a question about why 19 out of every 20 times I tried to see who was linking to MarketingShift in their posts I was greeted with the infamous error message. Niall had a pretty good analogy on why my site wasn't returning results. Although it's kind of humbling, because I'm not near as cool as I thought I was, it's still insightful and worth a share.

Question: Whenever I search for posts linking to www.marketingshift.com - my blog - 19 out of 20 times it gives me the message about the servers being busy but I have yet to experience it with that ratio on any other url I've tested. Would like to know if there is something I can do on my end to correct that behavior.

Niall's Answer:

"No, but thanks for asking. The timeout on a search for your blog is related to the performance of our URL search backend which is currently undergoing an overhaul to better serve and scale with the emerging blogosphere. Differences between URLs or over time are most likely due to the recency of a blog citation added to our index. It really depends on the level of activity around the URL. I like to think of it in terms of office organization. You have a bunch of papers and some sit on top of your desk and others are filed away in a filing cabinet. If you happen to be one of the newer documents to come across the organization stream you might be sitting somewhere on top of the desk for easy access and the query returns. Other times we have to go into the filing cabinet, which takes a bit longer and can timeout"

Although this doesn't solve my problem, it is a good explanation by Niall on how their process works and might help some of you feel better, or not. Basically, my blog isn't as popular as I'd like to think it is and thus not in Technorati's high priority queue. Perhaps landing a clothing sponsor will help out with my popularity, sha right!