Is Sphinn Being Sphammed?

I’m a great believer in the power of communities to generate great information by crowdsourcing. I have to admit that I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time at Sphinn, a sort of Digg for SEOs/Webmasters. When I have stopped by, I’ve invariably found some links to cool content. Now, longtime member of the SEO community pageoneresults (aka Edward Lewis) has published data which purports to show that some Sphinn members are sabotaging the community for their own benefit:

Sphinn IS being Sabotaged

The above password protected PDF document contains a “small sampling” of content that “is” getting indexed “under” and “across” the Sphinn.com domain. The abuse is far greater than the “small sampling” shown in The Smoking Gunn document. If you don’t believe me at this point, please do ping me and I’ll be more than happy to explain in great detail. The Sphinn Community is being “Sabotaged” by various entities from a multitude of angles.

1. What’s New Sphamm (the bait and, the diversion tactics)
2. Auto Voting on Sphinn - SphinnBot Sphamm (the bottom feeders fueling the What’s New Sphamm)
3. Nodes “outside” of the Sphinn Network (the sharks and whales feeding off Sphinn)
4. Nodes “underneath” the Sphinn Network (the black hole sucking the lifeblood from your Node, Community and, Network Reputations).

For a full view of all of this, see Content Cross Contamination. As a guy managing or involved in a variety of Web communities, I can attest that just about any user-driven site that gets traction will draw the unwelcome attentions of those who want to abuse it. The part that I don’t quite understand is why, if some Sphinn members seem to be engaging in questionable promotional activity, they are still active and in apparent good standing.

PageOneResults is a very bright guy, and this body of research is extensive… At the same time, Sphinn is part of Danny Sullivan’s Third Door Media group, and it seems like these guys would wise up quickly to any attempts at manipulation. Experienced community operators are pretty good at sniffing out even subtle promotion, and one would think that anything documentable would have been quashed quickly.

I’m going to continue to digest P1R’s data… In the meantime, what do you think?

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