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…
June 3rd, 2008 at 13:05
I contacted the hostmaster on aboutus to remove the empty page they automatically generated ‘on my behalf’. They said they won’t delete the empty page, as their bot would just recreate it - even if I have their bot disallowed in robots.txt?
Theres nothing usefull for a small sites, searching our keyword just brings up their listing, I’m surprised google even indexed the page considering theres nothing on it but ads.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:56
I honestly hadn’t even been to the aboutus.org site until a few minutes ago. I was trying some SEO out on deep links to sites and about us was coming up a quite a bit.
But then on my own Free Resume Site I’m finding that people are googling their names and pulling up their resumes.
My point is, as this job site acts as a middle man between connections, the about us site acts the same way, creating backlinks, providing referal links, and a conduit to your presense.
Bottom line last thoughts, would you rather someone linking to you for which you have no control, or someone linking to you for which you do have control over.
I know which one I’d take.
August 2nd, 2008 at 0:57
Isn’t it interesting how those for Wiki always avoid the fact that a domain name holder already has the say and how they dance around the opt out completely? Are you people so stubborn communistic and just plain hard headed to realize that we the domain holder have the right to say and yet you still maintain things your way. Give us the opt-out or you have never seen such a flame that I shall help fan against your arrogance , if you do not. Now I have every right to be ill because you the Wiki aboutus.org owners are doing just what you want and for yourselves and there can be no other way to see that because that is currently the way it is, with you people holding the upper hand as far as what can be edited and or deleted. (As far as that goes) Now try this one on for size: Fix your bot to obey a black list, allow a owner to opt out when he puts your bot in his disallow robots.txt file then send that puppy home to that website owners Wiki page and have that bot delete it (completely) or carry a message home to the one or program that shall. end of problem.
Or do nothing and continue to cause domain owners heart rates to go up , along with their blood pressure and see how you feel when someone actually sues you due to your arrogance in this matter! (Now try and twist that out of context, like you’ve done most every other suggestion and or complaint.)
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:37
P.S. Make that a white list for the ones that agree to opt-in pnce you’ve ask nicely. .
August 10th, 2008 at 4:34
The bottom line is that there’s only one question that governs whether or not a website like AboutUs.org is useful, positive, ethical, etc.
*** Do they give you a choice about whether or not you want to participate? ***
If the answer is no, I don’t care how much they could benefit persons XY or Z, their site is garbage.
Since AboutUs said they won’t remove my website from theirs and when asked why, they stated it wasn’t a part of their policy and pointed me to the page that says…
“We choose not to completely remove pages from our system because AboutUs aims to be a guide to websites, and deleting a page would make us that much more incomplete.”
… I’m not a fan. If I can’t tell someone else to take my website off of theirs, I’d rather see them disappear than get bigger.
August 15th, 2008 at 23:58
Well Internet is all about open world, no one controls anything else. If you have got brain then you know how to make aboutus.org pages generate more traffic than do harm for you
August 17th, 2008 at 7:04
(I agree Jen C.)
OK Poker, Who made that rule of open world ? And since when is having another site of any kind showing up above a domain owners site (in search results) a good thing? Enlighten us all on how adding them to my search key words and results is going to generate any traffic for me when I already have the upper hand on those key words without Wiki aboutus.org. For Example, if someone should type wiki into the search engine, am I going to show up? answer: NO! And if they need to type the domain in to get a response from Wiki, doesn’t that mean they could have just typed in the Domain and went there without Wiki Answer: yes, because obviously they would have it already or else they couldn’t type it in for Wiki. So where is the advantage to adding Wiki to my search terms? (Those closly related to the Domain name)- As far as gathering information other than that supplied from the domain itself, anyone can do a whois. And just about everything Wiki assoiates a domain with ends up adding that domain to a (URI) URL further trashing the results for the Domain added to the Wiki. Speaking of who is why would someone need to know what if any whois protection a party is using and why are those entries harder coded than other Wiki default entries.?
P.S. Poker,for the record I have considered doing what you spoke of, but test proved to only strengthen the Wiki and cloud my results all the more , including Wiki showing up in the # 1 position instead of My own Domain.
Peace friend(s) and thanks for your input