.: Link Spam - The Seedy Underbelly of Web Marketing
Category:Home / Internet / Spam
Link popularity has been the main technique for search engine marketers for at least the last few years. Some marketers have become so obsessed with link popularity that they have resorted to automated techniques to help them acquire one-way links. Some examples of link spam methods that are still being exploited are:
Guestbooks - In a woebegone era people placed simple scripts on their websites, with the hopes of getting feedback from their visitors. A great number of these scripts are still in existence. A web spammer will identify a guestbook because of its' footprint. Millions of these guestbooks have been abandoned and are not monitored by their owners. For this reason, automated guestbook spamming has been rampant. An interesting thing about Guestbook spam: some of them can even be spammed too death. Since many of these are old CGI scripts, they can't handle the volume of spam messages, and end up crashing. At that point the Guestbook will live on until the domain owner removes it.
Blogs - blogs became even more popular than guestbooks. they've been installed by the millions and abandoned at 90% rate. Blog software prior to 2005 had a default setting which allowed comments to be published without prior approval. It also allowed live html, so these blogs are out there still begging to be spammed and many are each day. What ends up happening is they get so many outgoing links that the page becomes a massive size, and at some point the page may even have trouble loading.
Forums - a frequent victim of webspam. Since almost all forums allow users to submit material without pre-moderation, web-spammers will attempt to post to them. The good news about Forums is that are usually not abandoned like Blogs or Guestbooks, and usually someone will come along and clean up the mess. This isn't always true, but it does happen quite a bit.
Any form on the internet that allows html is vulnerable to webspam attack. Without some sort of moderation it's impossible to ensure that malevolent html will not be inserted. if you don't pre-moderate the form, make sure you receive email notifications whenever the form is submitted. If you don't at least check the form often, it's inevitable that you'll be spammed by one of the numerous bots on spam duty.
Search engines introduced the rel nofollow tag in order to deal with the rising tide of link spam. All popular blog software comes with the nofollow in place, so the main risk of Webspam is to legacy blogs installed prior to 2005. Nofollow essentially tells the search engine that the link is untrusted. In essence it says this link was entered by a person other than the website owner, so treat it with a grain of salt. Forum software makers have also been quick to add nofollow to their core technology. The fact of the introduction of nofollow gives great insight into how much trouble search engines were having with the enormous load of link spam. Basically they threw their hands up and admitted defeat. Nofollow has had an enormous impact on Webspam, but there are still an awful lot of blogs and forums out there that haven't been patched.
Link spam appeals to certain web marketers for obvious reasons. It's a scalable and free solution to building link popularity. Web marketers who automate the process can quickly vary their anchor text between 'runs'. This will give them a wide variety of links from a broad spectrum of websites located on diverse IP addresses. This is normally a sure-fire recipe for success for virtually any website. By simulating the link popularity of a popular website, the link spammer is able to fool the search engines into assigning it higher rankings. The manipulation of link popularity has become a major issue to all of the search engines. Each will offer more and more attempts at reducing this threat, but unless search engine rankings are based only on on-page variables, it will always exist.
Article keywords: link popularity
Article Source: http://www.articles32.com
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.: New Spam Articles
1). Phishing For Your Identity
Phishing (pronounced as fishing) is defined as the act of sending an email to a recipient falsely claiming to have an established, legitimate business. The intent of the phisher is to scam the recipient into surrendering their private information, and ultimately steal your identity.
2). How To Recognize And Prevent Pfishing Scams
The warning notice you get from your bank over the internet may be a fraud. It is a scam intended to make you give up secure financial information. This article will show you how to recognize and deal with these frauds.
3). Investment Spam is Dangerous
Learn how to identify investment spam that has costed investors millions
4). Spam is a Beast
Spam has waged war on my sanity and I am helpless to do anything about it
5). Spam, Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam
Spam is best defined as unsolicited and unwanted commercial electronic messages or e-mails that are sent to large numbers of people. The term is also used to similar abuses in other media, like messengers and newsgroups.
6). Awareness To Phishing Is Your Best Weapon
Many people are focused on building value online by making sites that serve real purposes and help us make the most of our time and our lives, while some are trying to exploit surfers and mine away value away from those who work hard building it into there sites. This article is about the ways we have to protect our selves from this very popular scamming technique.
7). The Pornographic Nature Of Spam
There is a trend in malicious SPAM which is wreaking havoc on many computers worldwide. Find out what you can do about it.
.: Top Spam Articles
1). Seven tips for securing your organization´s network from spam and email viruses
Seven tips for securing your organization´s network from spam and email viruses
Providing security against email related threats has become a burden for most IT professionals in 2006. According to a recent study by Postini, spam and email viruses now make up to 80% of all emails sent out as compared to 50% in 2000. As a result, IT professionals now face a tougher challenge in providing network security for this amount of spam.
2). Antispam Organization Out There That's Fighting For You
There's an antispam organization out there that's fighting for you and could use your help.
CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, is an all-volunteer global entity that began as SPAM-LAW, a group brought together for discussion only. They put all their efforts into getting legislation passed that would help stop and penalize spam.
3). Free Spam Blockers
Remember when spam was just another horrible thing you would never eat? And then you grew up a little and spam became the lyrics to a great Monty Python song. And now spam is something to avoid at all costs. Or, in the case of free spam blockers, at no cost at all. Everything is better when it’s free, right? Such is the case with blocking out annoying spam from your email account, too.
4). How to Reduce Spam in Your Inbox and Enhance Your Email Security
Spam is the internet’s equivalent of junk mail. Spam is defined as an e-mail message sent to people without their consent or permission. Addresses of recipients are often harvested from Usenet postings or web pages, obtained from databases, or simply guessed by using common names and domains.
Spam is sent to promote practically any product or service ranging from “Adult” products to logo design for websites.
5). Spam, What is it Good for, Absolutely Nothing!
Over time, unless the growth of spam isn't stopped, it will destroy the usefulness and effectiveness of email as a communication tool.
6). How To Tighten Up Your Email Security
These days email is a necessary part of communication. However, this also means that email is one of the most popular ways for a virus to infect your computer. You need to protect yourself from the threat of fraud and infection.
Viruses
Email attachments often contain viruses so you need to be careful whenever you open any type of attachment even if you know the sender.
7). How to Benefit from Comment Spam
Comment spam is annoying. Here's a quick piece on how to turn the tables on the comment spammers and use their comments to your advantage instead of theirs.