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March 30, 2008

Barnes & Noble’s New How-To Site Quamut Already Being Link Spammed

Duncan Riley

28 comments »

quamut.jpgBarnes & Noble officially launched how-to site Quamut this week, and it’s already attracting link spammers.

The main service offers online guides that cover more than 1,000 topics written by experts in each field. Guides include illustrations and pictures and can be purchased as PDF’s or laminated how-to sheets. It’s a reasonable offering; nothing ground breaking but clean, thorough, and usable.

Quamut also offers a user-generated how-to wiki with similarities to Squidoo, but with no revenue sharing model for contributors. With no revenue sharing model there’s no obvious reason why someone would contribute to the Wiki (after all there’s no for the good of humanity angle like Wikipedia), but one week in free Google juice has become a driving force behind user contributions. Around half of all pages in the Quamut Wiki tested included links to external services, most clearly focused on gaining Google juice, for example links on terms like search engine optimization and web design (page here). A check of the source code on these pages show that links are not tagged link=nofollow.

B&N will likely crack down on this shortly, but it’s a lessoned learned: anywhere you offer unmoderated user contributions without safeguards, someone will always end up trying to exploit the situation.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. geyq.com

    March 31st, 2008 at 12:52 am

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    March 31st, 2008 at 11:08 am

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Comments

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  1. Solacetech

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

    “B&N will likely crack down on this shortly, but it’s a lessoned learned: anywhere you offer unmoderated user contributions without safeguards, someone will always end up trying to exploit the situation.”

    Yes… shame on those link spammers… trying to get better traffic via GooGle. Whatever happened to original, quality blogs…

  2. Sunil

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Link spammers are a serious problem. Any post i write on my blog. it goes to here gearfire.com with some other author name. and they displays some cheap ads along with my post.

    These websites become more searchable in google and even Technorati than my blog. :(

  3. bob cobb

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    Uhh, then stop running a crappy blog on blogspot sunil

  4. weilies

    March 30th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    how come i din’t see any spammed content there?

  5. Vini - Triimart

    March 30th, 2008 at 8:53 pm

    It become very hard to control link spammers in such situations, …. They should invite few volunteers to control such link spamming. Though its a Nice concept.

  6. Technicle

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    Just moderate the contributions, period.

  7. Technicle

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    For the rule of thumb has always been: there’s no free lunch.

    The same is true for B&N.

  8. Don Wilson

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    B&N? Really?

    A Web 2.0 site owner?

    Really?

  9. Sunil

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

    bob cobb,

    Not every blog can be techcrunch. To acheive this limit, you need a strong support and good finance And if you did not like it. No need to visit. I just shared my problem here, I have not said to visit my blog by the way.

    and this is the post i was reffering to

    gearfire.com/?p=31409

    it’s from my page with different author name.

  10. Jon

    March 30th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    What I like about this site is that it links a “page” of useful information with a listing of books that can help you find-out more about the topic… I think Wikipedia could learn a few things from this approach without pissing off contributors. What drives me nuts is their google ads click in a new window while I still don’t have that option in my adsense :-(

    3$ for a 2 page printout seems rather expensive considering you can buy some of these books for that price USED elsewhere or even get them free by going to the local library.

    I would see this site working great with authors but I don’t see much value for anybody else to be honest, the GJ isn’t going to last much longer and once they got some crazy moderators with a Napolean complex like on Wikipedia involved… the site becomes worthless for any SEO or SEM uses.

    Jon
    ps: If you are looking for some additional Google Juice, check out buzvia.com.

  11. wikky

    March 31st, 2008 at 12:57 am

    nice ,very good ,http://www.cnphotoframes.com/

  12. wikky

    March 31st, 2008 at 1:00 am

    http://www.trader-key.com

  13. I Am Posting To Spam My Blog

    March 31st, 2008 at 1:57 am

    They sure are Duncan!

    Now that you’ve read my valuable contribution to this thread, click here to find out how to turn your bodily fluids into CASH on the Internet!

    http://www.turnyourbodilyfluid.....ternet.com

  14. newssweb

    March 31st, 2008 at 3:46 am

    Should No Follow be in the mEta Tags or just where comments are located, by the way, I didn’t see Mixx using No Follow. Im looking for a good tutorial on No follow and how to insert it. Thanks

  15. Jim McNelis

    March 31st, 2008 at 6:24 am

    pretty obvious that the author has limited knowledge on the matter.

    What’s “google juice” ? LOL

  16. Jim McNelis

    March 31st, 2008 at 6:59 am

    After posting my last comment and following the link to TechCrunch Forums, I found an entire wealth of Link SPAM right on this site. Get your forums in check, it’s looking like a bad neighborhood.

  17. Sudoku Maniac

    March 31st, 2008 at 7:05 am

    Quamut.. what does the name mean ?

  18. Chris

    March 31st, 2008 at 11:47 am

    Perhaps it’s getting spammed because the “quamut” sounds like one of those random-gen’d words that spammer’s insert into their nonsense ;-)

    Seriously, what an unattractive name.

  19. Blog seo

    March 31st, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    I think is going to be a hard job to control de links spammers, probably it could be imposible to check all them.

  20. wikky

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    http://www.china-kitchen-cabinets.com B&N will likely crack down on this shortly, but it’s a lessoned learned: anywhere you offer unmoderated user contributions without safeguards, someone will always end up trying to exploit the situation.

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    April 6th, 2008 at 12:44 am

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  22. Symbiat

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:47 am

    I guess nobody noticed that the site was fixed a few days later so all links now have the rel=”nofollow” attribute so search engine’s won’t even bother spidering those.

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