One of the most offensive forms of spam is pornography spam. Unlike most other spams which may use a web site simply as a tool to take your money, with porn spams the web site IS their product.

And from that comes this idea. Now that Google offers email accounts, they have to implement spam filters. They could use the collected spams to identify web sites that engage in this practice.

From there it is very simple: incrementally decrease the PageRank™ of those web pages, every time they are advertised in spam. Not only has the spam been blocked, but the likelihood that someone will find their website through other means is lessened as well.

Despite the title, this idea could be implemented by any vendor who offers both a popular search engine and email accounts. (i.e. Google, Microsoft or Yahoo).

<super-rapid announcer voice>PageRank is a trademark of Google, Inc.</srav>
-- krelnik, Aug 28 2004

Don't people pay to increase their rank? Or is that only the sponsored links at top? Either way, I'd love to get my hands on the guy that sent my mom Donkey-show porn emails. But, of course, his ISP was in Mother Russia. >:[
-- Voltmeter, Aug 28 2004


[Voltmeter] No, you can't pay google to increase your page rank. (You can hire consultants that claim to help, though.) Only the things clearly labelled as advertising can be bought. Other search engines differ in that.

Aren't porn web pages that spam feeds into directly so short-lived that this wouldn't work? With all the bounces and redirects, you'd have to go evaluate a bunch of JavaScript to even find out where the journey ends.

And then there's still the problem of innocent bystanders being dragged into this; e.g. the frequent links to legitimate businesses from impersonating messages, and joe-jobs from competitors to decrease a business's page rank.
-- jutta, Aug 28 2004


I think this sounds like a winner of an idea, but I suspect [jutta] knows more than I do about this stuff. I have never followed spam links due to the irrational fear that it might encourage more of the stuff, but it shouldn't be hard to spot any legit site that's spam-jamming and de-Google it.
-- wagster, Aug 28 2004


[wagster] that's perfectly rational. It's like dropping litter, if everyone rationalises it by saying 'everyone else does' we're up to the knees in polystyrene McCrap and Twinkie wrappers. I dream of slapping those who do buy from spam with a big wet fish.
-- stilgar, Aug 28 2004


You're right, jutta, the site to punish is usually not directly linked in the spam. Usually it goes through a redirect on one of the spammer's servers so that he can measure the click-throughs. I think this is mostly done with straight HTTP 302's these days, as you can't rely on people having Javascript turned on anymore.

//Aren't porn web pages that spam feeds into directly so short-lived that this wouldn't work?//
In a completely unscientific survey, I just went into my spam directory and clicked on a few of the porn spams. Three out of four were in the Google index when I looked them up.

Interestingly, they all had very low PageRanks already. Perhaps Google has already baked this? <grin>
-- krelnik, Aug 29 2004



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