Tailrank Blocks PayPerPost Bloggers

Today Tailrank had the unfortunate task of blocking a few weblogs from Tailrank's index due to link spamming.

These were PayPerPost bloggers linking to Sproose which purchased a PayPerPost campaign to astroturf their release.

We have no problem with bloggers selling ads and trying to make money but this type of linking behavior is essentially spam.

We're willing to reinstate these blogs if they'll migrate to using rel="nofollow" for future PayPerPost sponsored posts. For example, nearly all links in this post use rel="nofollow" to avoid confusing memetrackers and search engines.

Sproose is also blocked and we're willing to reinstate them as well if they'll stop running PayPerPost campaigns without insisting on a nofollow link. Spam is a top priority for a search engine and for them to resort to link spam to advertise their product is a bit hypocritical.

The spammed post will remain in our index for historical purposes but the ranking is reset and won't show up on any of our archive pages.

To date, we've been very trusting when adding weblogs to our index. This has paid off because we haven't attracted the spam that is problematic with other services. In fact, this is only one of a handful of spam posts we've had to deal with in the last year since our launch.

PayPerPost has received a great deal of criticism in the press for their lack of ethics. What I find most disturbing is the fact that PayPerPost is willing to hurt the search rankings of bloggers by not communicating the problems (spam) with selling links.

Tailrank isn't the only large site with this policy. MSN search has also promised to block websites that sell links. They're sending off email messages notifying them that they've been dropped from their index:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you've removed these links and we will reevaluate.

The only party I find at fault here is PayPerPost. We'd really love to reinstate these bloggers and add them back to our index and welcome them home with open arms. I assume they simply weren't aware of the problems with selling this type of link spam.

Tailrank on the Scoble Show

I saw down with Robert Scoble about a week ago to talk about Tailrank for the Scoble Show:

Kevin Burton is a talented developer who has worked on a variety of startups already including Rojo, and now TailRank which he started to be able to see what bloggers were talking about. Here I sit down with him for an interesting conversation in the lobby of San Francisco's Palace Hotel.

I think the interview turned out pretty well. The only mistake I made was that I left my cell phone on which is a slight problem. Luckily no one else called during the interview (sorry Robert).

I also gave a demo of Tailrank. Unfortunately, the realtime IM delivery feature actually worked right after they shutoff the camera. It was pretty amazing actually. Our crawler found a post on that topic right after I subscribed to the meme.

Tailrank Mobile Now Supports Verticals

Tailrank mobile now supports tech, politics, and entertainment. In the past we only supported the global view of all stories but now you can narrow your focus.

If you haven't yet used Tailrank mobile and have a modern cell phone with a browser you should definitely check it out. A lot of people really like Tailrank mobile and I'm pretty impressed with the feedback we've received so far.

I bumped into Eric Lin of Phonescoop today and he commented how much he liked our mobile version which reminded me that we've never implemented verticals.

Tailrank Interview on Folksonomy.org

The guys over at Folksonomy.org have published an interview with me that they conducted last week. Short but sweet.

What is TailRank and what are its major advantages over similar services?

Tailrank is a service that allows you to track the hottest news stories across the blogosphere.

There are a few similar services but we track more blogs, allow the user to create their own version of Tailrank, support full-text search, and allow delivery via Instant Messenger.

Please Take the Tailrank Reader Survey.

If you guys have a few seconds I'd really appreciate you taking the Tailrank reader survey.

This will help FM Publishing sell advertising on our site which means we can use the profits to invest in our infrastructure.

It also means we'll start to see more cool ads like Apple Computer and Dice.com which are much more tasteful than the bouncing heads or "punch the monkey" alternatives.

Tailrank in Top Ten Fastest Sites

We just rolled out some performance updates the other night and it looks like they've worked out very well! Tailrank is now in the top ten fastest sites over on grabperf. We're even faster than Google News!

What's really interesting is that I think I can get another significant performance boost out of the system which might allow us to take on the #1 position. I've got my eyes on you Technorati Mobile! ;)

Actually, I should get Tailrank Mobile on there. I'm sure it would take #1 slot right away.

Tailrank Indexes More Weblogs

If you've noticed more traffic on your blog recently it might be because Tailrank is now indexing more weblogs. We've deployed a new crawler and this week alone we've added 15k new blogs!

What's really amazing about this system is that we're adding new weblogs according to our proprietary ranking algorithms. This means that we should totally skip spam blogs altogether and weblogs will be added based on their ranking. This way Tailrank is always indexing the top weblogs (which have the most influence).

The goal of course is to add even more of the long tail into our index until we're indexing the whole blogosphere. We're in the process of deploying new hardware and working towards Taillrank 2.0 which should allow this to happen.

We'll be talking about this more and more in the coming weeks and we have a few surprises in the pipeline which should be pretty interesting.

Update:

Actually it wasn't a week. It was four days. We're also planning on cranking up the volume here in a few days so we'll be adding weblogs at an even faster rate!

RSS Improvements

We have a new release out with a bunch of small fixes. One of which improves the quality of our RSS feeds.

Now the feed uses elements which render better in client side RSS aggregators. Here's a screenshot from NetNewsWire:

Tailrank wins Time.com's Top 50 Coolest Sites

Time.com (in their infinite wisdom) seems to think Tailrank is one of the top 50 coolest websites on the Internet! I couldn't agree more!

Tailrank culls the day's top stories from thousands of blogs (both liberal and conservative) and news sites; the posts that are linked to the most and discussed the most bubble to the top. (Technology and General News are covered under separate tabs.) Registered users can create their own customized filter; there's a mobile version too and an RSS feed.

Pretty sweet I must say. We placed in the News and Information section along with Digg.

I also note that my friends at Phonescoop and Pandora were anointed with coolness!

Dave Needs Tailrank Mobile

Dave Winer just got a new Blackberry cell phone and now realizes he wants a mobile RSS aggregator:

Now that I have a BlackBerry, I want to take a PDA version of everything I do on my desktop with me into the PDA-land (otherwise known as The Real World). Immediately, every time I pick it up, I want to know what's new. I've got SMS to connect with other PDA users, and email for everyone else. But what about news? At first I thought a "mini" version of my news aggregator would be the right thing, but that's too much news. I want just-enough, which is less than the firehose

Sounds exactly like Tailrank mobile.

Dave. Just create a Tailrank filter and you can read it with Tailrank mobile. Just create an account, import your OPML, and then you can read it on your Blackberry.

Here's my filter for example. We don't have a UI to create this on the mobile device but once your account is setup you can view it just fine.

The great thing about this is that its exactly the opposite of the firehose. You can control how much water you want to drink at once. If you want to be more picky you can increase the value of min_ranking and Tailrank will show you fewer stories and with higher relevance.