Aboutus.org spamming search results
You have probably seen search results from aboutus.com in the result list at Google when searching for some company or domain. I just noticed the listing the other day when doing some SEO for this site. A Google search for cominvent currently brings the aboutus entry up on third place.
So what’s so wrong about aboutus’s practice? Isn’t it nice if they help people find sites and companies out there? Well, not necessarily. There has been a lot of criticism about aboutus’s practice, a Google search for “aboutus.org unethical” returns 550 hits (such as this). There are several bad things:
- They highly optimize all their pages to show up high on search results, causing them to steal traffic which should have come to your legitimate site. In turn they generate revenue to themselves, not to us as they claim themselves, by having people click their Google ads
- If you have not blocked their bot in your robots.txt (here’s how) your site will be crawled and parsed as soon as someone search for your domain…
- The information they crawl about your site cannot be removed once it’s in there - you can only edit it, as can everybody else. This is inconsistent, since they allow you to block their bot in the first place. You should protest about this practice to them!
- Anyone can edit the page about your site, thus you get the same valdalism issues as for Wikipedia, although worse since there are fewer editors caring about the correctness of the info about your company.
- Your page will only be fetched once, and after that the aboutus.org entry will not be updated manually, so it will pretty soon get out-dated. This, combined with the practice of not allowing deletions, is very very on purpose, to make you feel obliged to edit your entry, thus forcing more traffic and more usage of their own services.
Well, what I did, apart from adding their bot to my own robots.txt is edit my own entry, replacing all info with the text (removed by owner), inserting a text complaining about aboutus and inserting another link to my site.
February 13th, 2008 at 17:50
Couple of points:
* People that build great pages on AboutUs.org about their site have found that the traffic to their website increases.
* If someone is considering buying a product from you, they are likely to google you (just as you did to find that TechCrunch post). With a negative blog post (again, like that TechCrunch one), it lives there forever, without regard to how things have changed in the world. Talk about being out of date! But with AboutUs, the information can be updated and you are encouraged to take part in the conversation (AboutUs cannot take part in the conversation at TechCrunch in the same way). And, because AboutUs is not part of your site, not controlled by you, your potential customers are better able to trust what they find there, as a third party resource.
* You say bot-scraped info cannot be removed, but then you link to the http://www.aboutus.org/No_Bot_Policy, which clearly explains how bot-scraped into CAN be removed. I’ve gone ahead and done that for http://www.aboutus.org/ComInvent.com . I didn’t do the second step of removing the history, but I can. Just ask (support@AboutUs.org).
* The AboutUs community patrols every edit. You can also get http://www.aboutus.org/EmailAlerts when the page changes - no account necessary
Please let us know if you have further concerns. We’d love to win you over and become an asset for your business!
February 15th, 2008 at 9:06
Hi Ted, and thanks for taking the time to comment (what’s your role at AboutUs anyway, i did not see that from your info page?)
* I don’t say that AboutUs is bad for everyone. Internet is open and if people like your service, fine.
* I agree that it’s better to have some influence over content on other sites than none. I love Wikis
* But the very name itself “AboutUS”, is false, if the content is not controlled by US. You should call the site “AboutTHEM” if the goal of the service is as you claim to let OTHERS do reviews of what they feel about a certain site.
* I did not claim that bot-scraped info cannot be removed - that is exactly what I’ve done in restoring the entry I posted first
* Forcing people to send an email to get stuff removed is not friendly, nor secure, nor does it scale
I am not convinced by your “advertising” statements. I feel AboutUS abuses my registered company name to drive traffic to themselves.
My sole feature request is:
* Let webmasters avoid being crawled and included (already possible through robots.txt)
* Let webmasters who was unlucky to already be included get out by editing robots.txt and pushing a link “reload robots.txt” on their aboutus page
The current practice is simply inconsistent
April 6th, 2008 at 5:36
I think all the complaints about aboutus.org are not well thought out. I think the site is great for all small sites, and OK even for large sites.
This is just the next step in the internet. Think of it as a combo of Google and Wikipedia.
April 7th, 2008 at 16:33
What is good about searching for your own company name and finding your own site listing on page 2 or 3 and a bunch of ads-stuffed spam-sites on top-10 abusing your brand to generate traffic and ad-revenue to to their own site?
Sure, someone may love such sites and for some it may even generate traffic, but for the serious players on the net, it’s mostly noise, and it should be possible to opt out.
Just randomly checked in to “my” entry again, and my last edits were gone, censored away according to new editing rules… I made another attempt to make my site’s entry reflect my opinion…