[uf-discuss] What to do about SEO abuse of hcard-examples-in-wild?

[Sarven Capadisli]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 10:51 -0700, Edward O'Connor wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Lately there have been lots of questionable edits to the
> hcard-examples-in-wild page. I don't mean outright spam edits, which
> happen there about as often as on the rest of the wiki. The linked pages
> do technically have hCards on them. But there are many links from
> hcard-examples-in-wild to pages of dubious utility. Some examples:
> 
> * http://www.newtosandiego.com/Ocean-Beach-People's-Organic-Foods-Co-op/
> * http://howdoyouknowifyouhavebedbugs.com/
> * and many more along those lines.
> 
> I suspect some "SEO specialists" have adopted hCard on spammy pages like
> these precisely so they can link to them from our (high PageRank) wiki.
> 
> Personally, I think we should more heavily curate, or maybe even remove,
> this page. Back when hCard was new, having real-world examples was
> helpful to implementors. These days, hCards are on hundreds of millions
> of web pages. We can meet the needs of implementors by having a much
> smaller list of examples.
> 
> Thoughts?

* If even spammers use microformats, is mission accomplished? At that
point I imagine that microformatted pages is a fairly common practice. I
doubt that the examples in the wild wiki page would have much use.

* "Spammy" is a gray area. What makes one site any more spammy than
another when it comes to online marketing? What about the nature of the
content at given resource? Who gets to say topic X is okay but topic Y
is not?

* How would the community derive at a short list of sites? Would it be
by votes from the community, popularity, special ops "admins" making a
decision?

* What about the quality of the example resources in the list? Have they
been verified to contain valid hCards?

-Sarven