ORCID & “Customer Service”
The directory continues to face challenges with entries that exploit it for SEO benefit
Back in 2021, I wrote about how ORCID was being exploited by various malefactors, with a lot of entries about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, pornography, and a host of things that fouled up their stats, made the directory a bit of a joke, forced Google to heavily filter the site, and simply looked shoddy.
They since appear to have cleaned things up, with many of the offending keywords producing few if any suspect results. I wrote about this apparent improvement earlier this year.
Of course, I was criticized for calling attention to the problem, and received only silence for congratulating them on fixing it, but that’s how it goes.
In any event, today I accidentally discovered another zone of trouble in ORCID, one you can find by searching “customer service.” You get hundreds of spurious results, with Bronx Lawn Service being perhaps one of the funniest among a host of weird listings. Here’s a taste:
Of course, there are only a few hundred of these entries, which may be far fewer than existed last year, thanks to the prior clean-up. But ORCID remains porous, a popular target for SEO gaming, and relatively unverified.
Calling customer service . . .