Link Spam - The Seedy Underbelly of Web Marketing
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.