Clean Tweets: New Add-On Zaps Twitter Spam

Jun 16, 2009 at 1:58pm ET by Matt McGee

If you use Twitter regularly, you probably know spam is a growing problem -- particularly with Twitter's search engine and the way it surfaces trending topics. Danny Sullivan described how spammers are targeting hot keywords in his Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article 10 days ago. Since Twitter hasn't addressed the problem yet, the folks behind the BLVD Status web analytics tool have created Clean Tweets, a Firefox add-on that, in my brief testing, does a good job eliminating spam from Twitter search/hot topics. According to the Clean Tweets page, the tool does three thing to cut down [...]

Filed in: SEO: Spamming, Search Engines: Twitter

Russian Roulette: McAfee Details Web’s Riskiest Search Terms

Jun 9, 2009 at 3:05pm ET by Matt McGee

Somewhere online right now there's a music fan who's big on free downloads, likes Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" but doesn't know the lyrics, is looking for free ringtones, uses MySpace, likes to play solitaire and wants the latest game cheats. Like many of us, s/he uses a search engine to find all of these things. This person may as well be playing Russian roulette. In a recent report (PDF), online security company McAfee says those are some of the most dangerous search terms on the web. That's just a sample of the report's list of the 50 riskiest search terms in the U.S. "Maximum R [...]

Filed in: Ask: Web Search, Google: Security, Google: Web Search, Microsoft: Bing, SEO: Spamming, Stats: General, Top News, Yahoo: Search

Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem

Jun 6, 2009 at 4:46pm ET by Danny Sullivan

And so real-time search begets real-time spam. We knew this would happen, but it's annoying and becoming a growing problem. Question is, will Twitter do anything about it, beginning with removing its "Trends" feature?I got an up close & personal look at how bad Twitter "trend spam" has become when this week, our SMX Advanced search marketing conference became a trending topic. Trends are topics that are gaining attention on Twitter, usually identified by the use of a common word. For example, at SMX Advanced, attendees were told to add the hashtag of "#smx" to the end of their twe [...]

Filed in: Features: General, SEO: Spamming, Search Engines: Twitter, Top News

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