This should be fixed the old-fashioned way: By cutting off teh flow of money at the source. When clients are caught directly or indirectly using sock-puppetry and astroturfing on Wikipedia, banners should be added to the affected pages naming and shaming the clients.
"This page has been locked by Wikipedia in response to deceptive practices paid for by Engulf and Devour to circumvent our community standards and mislead readers."
If you want this to stop, you have to give the clients a disincentive. That will drive the good clients out and these firms will be left with erectile dysfunction flim-flam as their market.
Since these companies (or at WikiPR) are refunding the money when things don't work out they should just hire these PR companies directly via friends and family and watch those accounts that are editing the pages they paid to edit. Once they catch the people, they ban the accounts, revert the changes and then demand their refund. It's a basic honeypot.
There is a difference between an "SEO Company" and an "Extortion Company." This is an example of the latter. Those suckers are being blatantly deceptive and deserve to be approached with appropriate legal action. Sickening.
Of course you have to have a mechanism. Running an online business of any kind, but most especially with user-generated content, requires an unending investment in forensics. It's no different for Wikipedia than it is for eBay or even Hacker News.
Most of these companies would cease and desist after one politely worded but firm letter.
If they were the victim in the case, they would probably provide money and/or resources to track down a rogue PR firm, an unethical competitor, disgruntled ex-employee, or miscellaneous vigilante whack-jobber.
I don't think we need to get hysterical like some responders and assume that every corporation is out to do black bag jobs on each other. If they can spend a few bucks and get some easy astro-turfing, they will. If the penalties are such that it's not worth the bother, they won't.
Yep, I have had a few clients for minor hosting things not pay, and the most simple way is to revoke access to the content.
While putting some snarky comments on the page is funny, just taking it down would generally elicit the same response from a small minded shop keeper. Having dealt with the same stuff, shaming them or poking at their pride instead of having a very basic and honest discussion about consequences when they decide to not pay can lead them to become twice as bullheaded.
I still feel for the dev in this case, because this shit happens way too often in the industry.
Ask yourself this: What good does it do you to publicly air this stuff? Take the site down if you must, but enraging your clients, even deadbeat clients, I would guess is bad for business overall. You have to leave them room to save face.
Out of curiosity, can you name some of the legitimate businesses that were affected? I thought the algo only targeted content farms and sites that regurgitated other peoples content.
The bad actors are still liable. You go after them to force them to remove the original content that is being indexed.
Yes, it's whack-a-mole, but that will forever be the nature of the internet or any other tool that facilitates democratized content creation at effectively zero cost.
This is a bit different though. You are basically taking away a main revenue stream from websites, your main clients. That sounds like bad optics for them.
Based on the Google analytics the traffic's steady but who's to say that this won't happen in the future? I think the fact that this behavior is allowed to happen is the problem. Even if this adversely affects one real business it should be fixed.
To note - my mom found out about this site when she received a note telling her she needs to pay close to a $1000 to license the photo that was ripped off from her site. Otherwise she wouldn't even have found out about this.
It comes across as extortion. "Pay us money or we'll put up a sign saying you're a bad person for...doing exactly what the Inernet designed for." Surely this will kill their SEO as well.
Same thing happens to me at a lot of sites. It's infuriating. Especially when I contact the owner and offer a detailed explanation of why this is bad, and they respond explaining how it's not. I might support legislation that outlaws this. Maybe just a small fine to start. I also think if companies do this they should face increased punitive damages in the case of identity theft.
"This page has been locked by Wikipedia in response to deceptive practices paid for by Engulf and Devour to circumvent our community standards and mislead readers."
If you want this to stop, you have to give the clients a disincentive. That will drive the good clients out and these firms will be left with erectile dysfunction flim-flam as their market.
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