Text Laundering

9:34 am - Mon, Dec 21, 2009: 6 notes

Text laundering: The act of transforming text in order to confuse duplicate text detectors, for example those used by search engines like Google.

Here’s a recent Boing Boint post I picked at random:

If you’ve already made your Christmas gifts to Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!! Public.Resource.Org just ordered another 41 titles and spent $560 on some really great FedFlix from the vaults of the National Archive, there is still plenty of great material out there, so we put together an Amazon Wish List. If you see anything you’d like to buy the public domain we’ll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to our own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library.

Here I laundered it by using Google Translate to go from English to Korean and back to English:

If you already have a Creative Commons EFF your Christmas gifts and made a left and a couple do? In the public domain about how to buy gifts for! The other 41 titles are Public.Resource.Org instructions, and some really nice FedFlix In the $ 560 spent in the basement of the National Archives, there are still plenty of great material out, so we work together to insert the Amazon wish list. If you and we’ll take your DVD video to YouTube to upload anything I want to purchase a public domain security, Internet Archive, and in our own rsync / ftp public domain is a library of tapes in stock.

gbattle sez:

Chris, the best use case for text laundering is Craigslist posts, as they seek to reduce spam of multiple posts. The above method is perfect for allowing smart spammers to automate their posts and defeat CL’s duplicate post detection. However, I will say, if you used this method to build a dislocated linkfarm for SEO purposes, you could autogenerate 20-30X pages from a single content store. Milking the cow dry. Yet another reason for real behavioral social overlay for search and discovery.