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Next: Referrer Spam SpammingThe term 'Spam' comes from a Monty Python comedy sketch set in a café. All the dishes on the menu come with spam - a type of tinned ham. In the computer world spam is used to denote excessive repetition: multiple posts, usually commercial, to forums and unsolicited email are the two most frequent examples. For SEOers the term includes the excessive use of keywords, duplicate content, unnatural link structures and the posting of links to guestbooks and membership lists. Blog comment and guestbook spamThe blog or weblog phenomena has done a great deal to revitalize interest in the Internet following the dot.com bust. Using content management software blogs enable even technical neophytes (newbies) to publish their message. Blogs range from personal diaries to online-newspapers written by professional writers and journalists who enjoy the editorial freedom the medium offers. Blogs also have two features which attract high search engine rankings. Bloggers link freely to other sites, creating dense inter-linking between highly themed content. Bloggers are also prodigious, creating large quantities of fresh content. Blogs were designed from the start to be interactive. Readers can post comments and usually include links to other sources. These features mean that the most popular blogs have PageRanks of 7. The popularity of blogs was quickly spotted by the black-hatters. They found that they could boost the popularity of their own sites by using the comment, guestbook or memberlist features that are part of most blog software. Typing blog, weblog or guestbook into Google will bring up many high-ranking targets, especially when the query is combined with the "inurl" operator. Usually a spammer's comment is completely irrelevant and posted to multiple blogs as part of the same campaign:
Blog spam had the advantage of keyword rich anchor text coupled with highly ranked pages. The aim is not to get click through traffic but to subvert the ranking algorithms used by search engines. The fresh content offered by blogs means they get frequent visits from search engines. A day spent spamming the most popular blogs can rapidly boost a website to the top of the search engine results pages. As is often the case on the Web some of the most virulent spammers are pushing adult content sites and cover their tracks using anonymous proxies and compromised hosts. The popularity of this technique spread rapidly and blog spammers soon found themselves in an arms race. They would have to visit the best blogs on an ever more frequent basis as other messages would soon push their links off the coveted and highly ranked home page into search engine oblivion. Needless to say Blog owners are none too happy with spam. Some have removed comment pages or disabled the capability to post links. Others, wishing to preserve the spirit of the medium, spend hours moderating and removing a veritable tidal wave of spam. Technical solutions have been adopted, disguising outbound-links using Javascript or rerouting links via a hidden page to stop anchor text and PageRank benefits from being transferred. Unfortunately spammers are nothing if not persistent and spam-kiddies are often unaware that their efforts now have little effect. Search for Google for: Guestbook + <your keywords> and you can still find many examples like this one on a basketball site:
One theory on why spammers are so poor at grammar and spelling is that it helps trick automatic (Bayesian) spam filters. I suspect that after typing in 500 spam messages in a session they just get lazy.
See Also
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