Can we eliminate those zombie followers ?

If you are a user of any kind of Weibo of mainland China, it is not difficult for you to find a group of registered users which have became “influential”. (I seldom use Twitter, so I don’t know whether it is serious on that.). Everyday your Weibo account would be focused by several people with gaudy names or attractive profile photos, and you would be @ in commercial posts by some users you never known. We intuitively call these users “Zombie followers”, cause these people keep posting advertisements or doing focus on someone who needs a high rank, but they never post any energetic information about their life experience. What’s more, this kind of cheating has become a way of making profits. You can just spend little money on Taobao to buy thousands of focuses on your own Weibo in order to get a “V” authentication. Indeed, it crashes the balance of Weibo system and its ranking criterion.

a typical annoying @ on my Weibo

When Prof. Chan introduced the PageRank technology on lecture9, I was curious about whether “Zombie followers” have their power in Google engines. Later I know, the answer is definitely YES. As we know, in PageRank system, incoming and outcoming hyperlinks are important elements for computing the rank of a website. In order to gain incoming clicks or outcoming links, cheaters would post many unrelated URLs on their blogs or forums. These so called “rubbish spams” serious affected the healthy environment of the Internet.

In 2005, Two Google group leaders Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen introduced a method called “nofollow” to eliminate rubbish spams. Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the ‘rel attribute’ of a HTML. It is an element to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The attribute ‘REL=”NO FOLLOW”’ tells the search engine not to rank this link, but you can still visit.

How to set nofollow value

The ‘nofollow’ technology has gained great success, and then can we use something similar to fight Zombie followers in Weibo? Imagine that every user of Weibo has to set an attribute of his followers, for example, say ‘trusted follower/distrusted follower’. Then every Weibo user can have a hidden information which can only be seen by administrators. This may give Weibo operators a useful criterion to catch out Zombie follower and they can later send alert messages or directly ban these cheaters’ accounts.

Reference URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://baike.baidu.com/view/1584081.htm