Keeping your free hosting service valuable for searchers
Keeping your free hosting service valuable for searchers
Free web hosting services can be great! Many of these services
have helped to lower costs and technical barriers for webmasters
and they continue to enable beginner webmasters to start their
adventure on the web. Unfortunately, sometimes these lower
barriers (meant to encourage less techy audiences) can attract
some dodgy characters like spammers who look for cheap and
easy ways to set up dozens or hundreds of sites that add little or no value
to the web. When it comes to automatically generated sites, our
stance remains the same: if the sites do not add sufficient value,
we generally consider them as spam and take appropriate steps
to protect our users from exposure to such sites in our natural
search results.
If a free hosting service begins to show patterns of spam, we make
a strong effort to be granular and tackle only spammy pages or sites.
However, in some cases, when the spammers have pretty much taken
over the free web hosting service or a large fraction of the service,
we may be forced to take more decisive steps to protect our users
and remove the entire free web hosting service from our search results
. To prevent this from happening, we would like to help owners of free
web hosting services by sharing what we think may help you save
valuable resources like bandwidth and processing power, and also
protect your hosting service from these spammers:
Free web hosting services can be great! Many of these services
have helped to lower costs and technical barriers for webmasters
and they continue to enable beginner webmasters to start their
adventure on the web. Unfortunately, sometimes these lower
barriers (meant to encourage less techy audiences) can attract
some dodgy characters like spammers who look for cheap and
easy ways to set up dozens or hundreds of sites that add little or no value
to the web. When it comes to automatically generated sites, our
stance remains the same: if the sites do not add sufficient value,
we generally consider them as spam and take appropriate steps
to protect our users from exposure to such sites in our natural
search results.
If a free hosting service begins to show patterns of spam, we make
a strong effort to be granular and tackle only spammy pages or sites.
However, in some cases, when the spammers have pretty much taken
over the free web hosting service or a large fraction of the service,
we may be forced to take more decisive steps to protect our users
and remove the entire free web hosting service from our search results
. To prevent this from happening, we would like to help owners of free
web hosting services by sharing what we think may help you save
valuable resources like bandwidth and processing power, and also
protect your hosting service from these spammers:
- Publish a clear abuse policy and communicate it to your users
- , for example during the sign-up process. This step will contribute
- to transparency on what you consider to be spammy activity.
- In your sign-up form, consider using CAPTCHAs or
- similar verification tools to only allow human submissions
- and prevent automated scripts from generating a bunch of
- sites on your hosting service. While these methods may not
- be 100% foolproof, they can help to keep a lot of the bad actors
- out.
- Try to monitor your free hosting service for other spam signals
- like redirections, large numbers of ad blocks, certain spammy
- keywords, large sections of escaped JavaScript code, etc.
- Using the site: operator query or Google Alerts may come in
- handy if you’re looking for a simple, cost efficient solution.
- Keep a record of signups and try to identify typical spam patterns
- like form completion time, number of requests sent from the same
- IP address range, user-agents used during signup, user names
- or other form-submitted values chosen during signup, etc. Again
- , these may not always be conclusive.
- Keep an eye on your webserver log files for sudden traffic spikes,
- especially when a newly-created site is receiving this traffic, and
- try to identify why you are spending more bandwidth and processing
- power.
- Try to monitor your free web hosting service for phishing and
- malware-infected pages. For example, you can use the
- Google Safe Browsing API to regularly test URLs from your
- service, or sign up to receive alerts for your AS.
- Come up with a few sanity checks. For example, if you’re
- running a local Polish free web hosting service, what are the
- odds of thousands of new and legitimate sites in Japanese
- being created overnight on your service? There’s a number
- of tools you may find useful for language detection of newly
- created sites, for example language detection libraries or theGoogle Translate API v2.
Last but not least, if you run a free web hosting service be sure
to monitor your services for sudden activity spikes that may
indicate a spam attack in progress.
For more tips on running a quality hosting service, have a look
For more tips on running a quality hosting service, have a look
at our previous post. Lastly, be sure to sign up and verify your
site in Google Webmaster Tools so we may be able to notify
you when needed or if we see issues.
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