After making several iterations of a MapRoulette challenge and a recent diary entry about the topic, I thought it would be a good idea to start an open discussion about the state of SEO spam / brochure-style descriptions in OSM.
My current version of the Overpass query to find spammy descriptions gives more than 3,000 results. Over a thousand of these have already been fixed/removed. This is only in English, and similar queries for other languages would be helpful.
I tried the same query with the note tag, and it shows both fewer results and more false positives, but there is still more than a bit of spam in there.
A related topic that I have not yet explored in depth is logos in the image tag. This could also be worth looking at, e.g. with a query like this one.
Close observers may notice that I exclude results in Ukraine from my queries. This is because there is an ongoing conflict in the country and mapping there is currently discouraged. If you don’t like that you are free to adjust the queries to include this country.
4 posts - 2 participants
Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/seo-spam-in-osm/100424