That site is pure cancer. I opened the article in the same tab and then pressed back to come back to news.ycombinator.com, but it just showed me a bunch of blog spam from taboola which seemed to have hijacked the back button :-/
All our recent posts on social media (facebook, twitter) via buffer seem to have been automatically deleted. That's a lot of engaging posts, gone in a poof!
I'm curious as to whether this was misused by malicious website owners buying links for competitors and then reporting the competitor to the Webmaster team to get them lose their top ranking?
What steps does Google take to ensure this does not happen? A poster below asked the same question and someone else responded saying there are no documented cases of this happening, but let's just assume it's a hypothetical situation for now. What will Google do when something like this happens? How will they verify who was wronged?
I don't think the Panda update got it right with respect to the duplicate content problem though. I still see a bunch of StackOverflow content scrapers rank as high as StackOverflow and basically link back to StackOverflow. To the same post that is ranked number 1 for that particular query. Don't have examples right away - checking my history for those instances
One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems
The larger problem being, sites with duplicate content still rank as high as the original.
Start by doing something small. Do it well. Do it again and again and again. Until you think you can scale it up and it doesn't interfere with any of your personal commitments or dreams.
I was really impressed with this video by Derek Sivers about how startups don't need funding to start. Though in a different context, it puts the point across. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KLnXjqKL5g) If you want to make a big difference, start by doing smaller things and scale up.
It throws up a bunch of content out there when I choose a spark. I don't know how they rank the content or how relevant it is to my spark. For example, I tried "Soccer" and it threw up a bunch of results - one them was a link to http://kelviniransomes.blogspot.com/2011/06/eastern-district....
I'd imagined that when you add a spark, you get a bunch of stuff grouped under various categories and various types of information like News, Companies, Products, Blogs, etc. And in case of Soccer, I'd have wanted to see scores, league standings, etc. Basically be intelligent about the topic.
Spammers are the ones who use it extensively and that's why such a service was born. The percentage of people using it for other purposes would be infinitesimally small.
You can't directly attach value to the money they spend on this. They create accounts on many services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc for email spamming and they need to use these services for the tools that they purchased to work. These tools basically automate everything except the captcha solving part.
Ok I stand corrected, the economics of paying for forum spamming does not make sense and the software you mentioned (I don't want to name it here) does solve many captchas automatically (It is even rumored to solve Google's captchas)
But for other stuff that I mentioned in my previous comment, it does make sense for them economically and they do use it.
Automated forum account creation/posting, blog comment spamming, craigslist account creation/posting to name a few.
Some other famous sites that are doing this since the mid 2000s - http://decaptcher.com
They integrate with just about every famous spam tool.
UPDATE: Automated Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail account creation, etc. They create accounts in bulk and then spam through the gmail, yahoo, and hotmail accounts by tools that are being sold.