Public pages, pricing plans and search engine spam
Posted by Bill Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMT
At the moment our free plan allows the opportunity to make your pages public – accessible to the whole internet – and some of our users have found that feature useful. Unfortunately the most common use of our public pages has turned out to be gaming the search engines. We realise that there is a broad spectrum of activity here and that “offsite SEO” can be a legitimate activity, but alongside the more responsible end of that market, we’ve also attracted some plain old spam. It’s not what our service is intended for and we’d like to politely ask those people to go elsewhere.
So a month from now, on 22 February 2010, we will be changing our Trial and Free pricing plans so that you can no longer make pages public. There will be no change for our paying customers. We’d like to say sorry to those of our free account holders who find this feature useful, but we hope that by giving a month’s warning, you have time to make alternative arrangements if necessary. And of course we won’t be deleting anything, you will still be able to access all your pages when logged in.
If you have any questions about this change, send us an email at support@swirrl.com
I don’t know if this is an option for you (or whether you’re doing it already), but in my experience, putting in a CAPTCHA test for unregistered users eliminates about 99% of spam.
Thanks, Yaron. The problem isn’t unregistered users, it’s people who sign up for a free account purely to get some free web space for advertising or link farming.
There’s not a massive amount of it, but it’s steadily increasing as link farmers discover us. We don’t really want to be associated with that kind of activity, and it’s not what Swirrl is for, anyway.