Joho the Blog: Block that link!

November 05, 2007

Block that link!

According to this post at DailyKos, Congressperson Adrian Smith doesn't like what an anti-Smith blog says about him, so he's blocking incoming links to his website from all of the .blogspot domain, or so the best guess goes. So, if you click on a link to the Rep's web site, and that link is on a page at the .blogspot domain, you get a 404 dead end.

Your democracy tax dollars at work!

Later that same day: Sethf points to the explanation by the host that it's been blocking all traffic from blogspot because of "spider spam." Wow. That's either an excessive fear of "spider spam" - keep in mind that the host is blocking anyone who clicks on a link to one of their sites if that link lives at .blogspot - or an excessive devaluation of the presence of blogs. In any case, it looks like it was a generic block (temporarily lifted), not one aimed at the anti-Smith site.

Posted by D. Weinberger at November 5, 2007 07:55 PM

Comments

Debunking - Congressman Adrian Smith NOT blocking blogspot bloggers

Why do I bother? :-(

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein | November 6, 2007 10:06 AM

doesn't cost much to block referrers...

Posted by: Eric Gauvin | November 6, 2007 11:07 AM

doesn't cost much (if anything) to block referrers...

Posted by: Eric Gauvin | November 6, 2007 11:08 AM

Excessive use of the spam blacklist, maybe. I suspect they applied it to every page, where they could have applied it more lightly (perhaps just to executables?). But then, they got the blacklist from a third-party, and probably didn't realize how aggressive it was.

On the other hand, if they made a mistake being too loose, they might suffer a story of "Congressman XYZ's is a spammer!".

FYI, the false story is still echoing around the bogosphere.

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