[Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 11:40 AM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>
wrote:
>
> To me that leaves us with a couple of choices. One, we continue to develop
> more sophisticated tools to identify and revert the spam or two, we develop
> tools to help SEO firms add data to OSM in a manner acceptable to us.  Or
> maybe some of both. Jason Remillard post has some positive recommendation
> on how to do the first. We should listen to him. One recommendation - make
> what we do very public. If SEO firms realize that they are wasting money
> they may stop. Remember they are very good at figuring out how to
> manipulate search engines. If they can do that, they can figure out how to
> better mask their edits.
>

My vote is both.  Obviously the way things are now, they're not right, but
they're not exactly wrong, either.  Particularly in the US, where address
data is a real pain in the butt to acquire (and something I recently posted
extensively about
<https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7y69pp/why_openstreetmap_is_in_serious_trouble_emacsens/dueicrh/>,
and I'm pretty certain I've covered here as well already).  The biggest
problems I see with SEO spam is that the tag values often don't conform to
any accepted convention (phone numbers, opening hours, and amenity=* or
shop=* tags seem especially problematic), and description=* or note=*
getting used for really smarmy ad copy, and using a geocoder referencing a
potentially copyrighted dataset we don't have a license to use.


> As for the second suggestion, make it easier for SEO firms to add data, we
> could create a policy and process to accept imports from SEO firms. The
> other web map sites like Google, Bing, Apple etc. all have a process for
> bulk loading data. (And none are the same.) We could do something similar.
> A policy and specialized import guidelines would need to be created.
>

I'm OK with this.  I think two rules definitely should be included as
minimums:

   1. All SEO edits from such companies must come from clearly identified
   accounts.
   2. These accounts must be responsive to comments via the message system
   and changeset comments.

I think we're all in agreement the level of communication we're getting
with the flood of one-off SEO accounts is, to put it generously, terrible.

One of my beliefs from looking at SEO spam is that I believe the work is
> likely being outsourced. Two many similarities exist that to me suggest
> these are coming from a common source.  The user name, the changeset
> comments, etc. I did ask Margaret Seksinski with Brandity if she could help
> us learn who might be behind this spam. I have yet to hear from her.
> Unfortunately, it appears Brandify doesn't want to be a part of the
> community, just use us for their gains.
>

If they don't want to play ball, then how about redirecting their entire IP
space to a message explaining our concerns, so it can't be ignored?

As much as I hate the spam in the description tag (should rename it spam=*)
> it is helpful in attempting to determine the correct tags. After which,
> it's no longer useful and can be deleted.
>

Not a bad option.  Maybe document that in the wiki?


> Finally let's not lump all SEO firms together. The Laua Group is doing a
> great job for Hilton Hotels. We should encourage more firms to be good
> community members.
>

Hip hop hooray!  Granted, though, we can't reasonably expect them to police
the entire industry on our database.
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