Penalising Extensions With Hidding Advertising

[alledia]

Hi All

We've just found that Joomap and XMap have hidden advertising links.

The full details are http://www.alledia.com/blog/rants/lates ... vertising/ but the long and the short of it is that they had a rotating series of text links back to the developer's site. These were invisible links at the bottom of the sitemaps.

On Joomap this was undisclosed for several versions but they've recently added a small on / off switch. The non-disclosure wasn't great but even with the on / off switch its not made clear that checking "on" will put you in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

I am told that Joomap are fixing this for the next release and I'm not really posting here to complain about them, especially as we've been through this several times before with other components.

Instead I'd like to propose a couple of solutions:

1) Hidden advertising be added to the list of Extension Directory rules and components using it be subject to the same three step penalty process as others who break the rules.

2) Longer term, perhaps we could include like Joomla Credits in the Joomla core with a link to it from the Main Menu. People who don't want it displayed can simply unpublish the menu link. This would make it easy for everyone to understand who they are linking to. It would also mean that Joomla developers could give away their products and perhaps get even more links than they do now, without needing to be deceptive.

[guyjosephuk]

What about those extensions and templates that insert hidden links back to their own sites. Will they put me in

put you in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

I really object to an extension puting content on my site (and thats what a link is) without my knowledge or permisson

[alledia]

Yes, 100%. Technically you'll be in violation of Google's guidelines.

Whether or not sites will be penalized is a question thats difficult to determine, but the violation is clear.

http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=66353

I've bolded key statements:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

    * Using white text on a white background
    * Including text behind an image
    * Using CSS to hide text
    * Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

    * The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
    * CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
    * The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

As above, I think including Joomla Credits in the Joomla core is a positive way to solve this.

[LorenzoG]

Hi Alledia,

Thanks that you bring up this issue and I share your concern. We are aware that a few extensions have/have had issues with hidden links and we have also found other hidden issues in a few extensions. We have discussed this within the team and we have handled the issues case by case.

When it concerns outgoing links, you are as website owner supposed to have control which links you are linking out and in which way you do it. However, it isn't easy to follow the guidelines or not linking to "bad neighbourhood" if you aren't aware of the links and as you correctly points out, you can get punished by the search engines.

I feel that we still need to continue to discuss this within the team so we can give the 3rd party developers that have extensions at JED guidelines what is acceptable and not acceptable.

[alledia]

Thanks Lorenzo

I understand that developers want something back for their efforts, but its good if we work towards providing them with clear, open links (for example, from JoomlaCredits) and don't accept invisible links.

Perhaps these two criteria are all that is needed:

1) Links should be clearly visible on the page  (can be done reasonably quickly as only a few components, modules and templates do this)

2) Links should be easily removable by someone with no HTML knowledge - a checkbox in the admin panel, perhaps. (this could be something required of new extensions as most old extensions aren't coded this way)

[garyamort]

Thanks Lorenzo

I understand that developers want something back for their efforts, but its good if we work towards providing them with clear, open links (for example, from JoomlaCredits) and don't accept invisible links.

Do we penalize sites who don't publish their Joomla credits?  Perhaps sites owners that don't post credits should not be allowed to post on the forums with any questions? 

Perhaps these two criteria are all that is needed:

1) Links should be clearly visible on the page  (can be done reasonably quickly as only a few components, modules and templates do this)

I'd agree with that one.  Hidden links are sneaky.

2) Links should be easily removable by someone with no HTML knowledge - a checkbox in the admin panel, perhaps. (this could be something required of new extensions as most old extensions aren't coded this way)

I'd disagree with this one.  If someone is too lazy/cheap to have the links removed from the HTML code when they are clearly visible - than they can simply self filter only components that allow them to hide the links without much effort.

If they really want to use a component that has links, than the onus is on them to do whatever needs to be done to make it work with their site.

[alledia]

Hi garyamort

Thanks for the reply

I'd recommend making Joomlacredits optional in the same way that linking to Joomla is optional. However, given Joomla's huge reach, even if 5% of people use it, thats a flood of 10,000s of genuine links for developers.

#2 ... after pondering this, I think you're right. A visible link as opposed to a hidden link is the core issue.

[garyamort]

I'd recommend making Joomlacredits optional in the same way that linking to Joomla is optional. However, given Joomla's huge reach, even if 5% of people use it, thats a flood of 10,000s of genuine links for developers.

Certainly...I was just making the point that if your talking about "penalizing" developers who freely donated their time and effort to provide components for people to build sites, than the same logic should hold for website owners who take from those developers and don't credit them. 

#2 ... after pondering this, I think you're right. A visible link as opposed to a hidden link is the core issue.

Precisely.  Hidden links are sneaky and should not be published...  Actually, I will make one exception, if the output of a program is "hidden" than links in that output are acceptable, not wanted, but acceptable.

As examples of that:
A component that generates RSS feeds from a site and places a "powered by xyz.com" in the feed.  Technically, it is "hidden", but since the website owner specifically requested hidden output...

The other is components used to generae meta tags adding their own meta tag of "meta tags powered by..." - again, if you asked for hidden tags, you should be checking them(though I think ArtioSef takes it too far with their advertisements... 

Naturally, the only way to "penalize" a developer is to not use his products.  Just like the only way to "penalize" a site owner is to refuse to answer his questions.

But it would be nice if there was some flag that could be flipped in the extentions directory for extentions which self promote, and ones that self promote in a sneaky way.

[alledia]

Found another extension operating in a very grey area .. the Fireboard searchbot:
http://www.bestofjoomla.com/component/o ... Itemid,67/

It places an ad for the developer as the first result in all searches made on your site.

Again, not disclosed, but there is a small option inside the mambot to turn it off. I spoke to several people who had the advertising for months without realising.

[alledia]

One more (fixed now) to add to the list:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... 153249.htm

[alledia]

And here we go again ...

Smoothgallery by OSCandy.com contains three hidden backlinks with the text:

"Please do not remove this line, visitors don't see it, but search engines do. We appreciate backlinks, please consider this your thank you."

[alledia]

And again ....

Joomlart's Transmenu: click to see how many sites are hiding links they don't know about

[alledia]

Now Wales' national assembly is running a Joomla website and has discovered hidden advertising from Joomap: http://www.dysg.org.uk/

These hidden links don't do anything for Joomla's credibility.

Are we any closer to a decision on this topic?

[LorenzoG]

We are most likely going to add a new rule against hidden and unethical behaviour, but we want first to discuss it carefully.

We have gone through the reported extensions and we have now added an Editors note, there we have found hidden links and advertisement.

We haven't taken't any steps towards the following two mentioned extensions.
xmap - the link is fully visible for the visitor
Fireboard searchbot - nothing hidden that can affect the Search Engine ranking. It can however be discussed from an ethical view.

[alledia]

Great news, thanks Lorenzo

I think this will do quite a bit to protect the reputation of Joomla and 3rd party developers.

Both Xmap and Joomap corrected the mistake very quickly when the issue was raised (although a lot of people downloaded it before the links were publicised.)

The Fireboard searchbot is just odd - not much use to either the developer and certainly none to the site owner or visitor.