Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Greg Morgan]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 3:44 PM, Frederik Ramm  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> * Contact the mapper responsible and politely ask them to fix it and/or
> stop adding advertising. In most cases, since these are throwaway
> accounts created by professional spammers, you won't receive a response
> but when in doubt, try it.
>


> * Use the business contact information provided to call/email them and
> ask which SEO firm they have paid to add data to OSM, and explain how
> this volunteer project is damaged by the actions of the SEO firm and
> that this also tarnishes the business reputation. Recommended if you
> like a little fight; some SEO operations have already been stopped from
> abusing OSM that way.
>
> * Should we have some MapRoulette task or OSMCha automatism or OSMI view
> to detect potential advertising?
>



> The data is in CSV format with the columns:
>
> date_last_edited,object,created_by,last_edited_by,name,description
>
>
> http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/us-seo.txt


 Frederik,

Thank you for the cleanup that you have done.  As of late my changesets
have focused on addressing and additional cleanup of Search Engine
Optimization, SEO, spam in Arizona.  In the case of SEO spam you might just
be wasting your time trying to contact them.*  Here are two examples of SEO
spam that I finally deleted.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4784217504/history
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Copper%20Canyon%20Law%
20LLC%C2%A0Tax%20Attorney

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4792771037/history
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Simplified%20Celebration

The first set of links are actually in Arizona while the second set of
links are for a company in Washington State.  I tried contacting the owner
of the first set of links*.  I received no response.  I provide these ids
because it would be interesting if someone can look into the OSM database
and see if these SEO mappers used the same SEO spam email address company
i.e. seosp...@seospamcorp.com.  If so, then a black list filter at the OSM
signup level could be a great tool to fight the spam.  I also wonder if a
black list service such as https://www.spamhaus.org/organization/dnsblusage/
might help or if we can use the service.  I would think that OSM qualifies
at under 100,000 emails/accounts a day.  Anyhow, many months after my
email* and around 11 months in OSM, I finally deleted both of these spam
nodes.  It feels like my email went to the spammers and not the business
owner.  I also wonder about the user account.  Has the spammer still won if
the name is not change to user_x and the contact email removed?  I also
found it interesting that mapper Владимир%20К  thought it important to undo
some of Frederik's changes as can be seen in the history for these nodes.

I am not sure that a MapRoulette task would be of helpful but that may be
worth a try.  Your OSM Inspector address overlay[1] has been a great tool
for hunting down the SEO spammers and advertisement.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4911881645/history

Where your address checker helped on this address was that the house number
was in the general range of address numbers but Camelback Road is way south
of this location.  That address came up as a nice red shinny dot in a
residential area.  Mapillary sequences on Camelback Road would make it
easier to add the address at the correct location verses moving the
address.  Resolution delete.  A MapRoulette challenge for a mapper outside
my local area may take a large effort to correct the address verses my
quick determination. As an example,  Владимир%20К, from Russia could not
determine that these were bad addresses and not worth saving.  In another
set of changes[2], a mapper from Germany could not determine that 1 was the
wrong address number for the area.  We need additional tools with address
number ranges and zipcode boundaries to detect these issues.  Moreover, the
US states need to be treated like individual countries in Europe.  Pascal's
OSM tool does not help me at a state level when the whole US is treated as
one blob.

Several years ago I had two mappers add a bunch of addr:* tags in my
mapping area then disappear.  All those red streets in OSMI made for an
ineffective tool.  The red from the streets reduced the effectiveness of
detecting bad addresses/spam.  I have cleaned up most of these streets
now.   Now I can use OSMI to also detect street names that have been
changed to business names by SEO or other kinds of map spammers.  Of course
that only works if I have address coverage to match.  In this cause, all of
the address nodes would turn red.

The last set of links that I provide you is also number two in Frederiks'
Arizona list. I will soon be deleting this spam. Now people _please don't
click_ on the URL in the node if you do not like birthday suits. I believe
this was really was a yoga place at one time but now is into some other new
age stuff.  Yet this kind of spam is just a redirect to a birthday suite

Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Simon Poole]

While I don't think supporting specific, rather questionable business
models, is something we should expend a lot of effort on, improving the
tooling for individual businesses to maintain an entry in OSM is (and a
serious SEO shop could easily use such tools).

Some may have already had a look at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMyBiz  which is not quite ready
for prime time yet, but due to be released rsn, There's a test instance
running against the dev sandbox, but I need to check with Stefan if we
at this stage should be pointing to it, or not simply waiting for the
release version.

Simon



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