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Monday, October 27, 2003

Wired News: Spammers Clog Up the Blogs: "Across the Web, spambots were churning through bloggers' comment threads, leaving behind dozens of links embedded in key phrases like 'buy viagra' or 'diet pills.' Others, more deviously, posted innocuous blurbs like, 'Nice site you have here!' and embedded the spammer's URL in the comment signature, under fake names like 'underage,' 'cheap shoes' or 'phentermine.'
Bloggers agreed that, unlike garden-variety e-mail spam, the comment spam they were receiving was not designed to attract click-throughs. Its primary audience wasn't human; it was the all-seeing search-engine robot...
By embedding URLs in hundreds of blog comments, spammers apparently think they can trick search engines -- particularly Google -- into believing that the blog community is abuzz with news of the latest cheap Viagra website. Since Google treats links as a measure of popularity, the thinking goes, a network of blog links pointing at the spammer's site will give it preferential placement in search-engine rankings.

Sullivan added that whatever effect comment spam had on search-engine results would be unlikely to last long. "All spamming types of things are failing strategies," he said. "They may work for a very short period of time, but search engines come back, and it's another step in the constant arms race between search engines and the people who optimize for them."