Archive for the ‘Fighting SEO Spam’ Category

Wikipedia Hits Back At The Spammers

In a surprise move, online resource site Wikipedia recently announced that all outgoing links from the site have been tagged as “nofollow” - which effectively renders them of no value when being considered by search engines. While the move has angered many, Wikipedia have seen a massive increase in spam links which offer little or no benefit to the massive online community which the site has fostered.Is The Move Justified?

While it is easy to see why Wikipedia have carried out the exercise (which is just temporary until they find a more efficient way to identify spam), there are millions of valid outgoing links on the site which will suffer. This move has also had a major impact on the Page Rank of many sites, thereby having a knock-on effect to both advertising and traditional business income for the sites in question.

Wikipedia itself relies on the contributions of third parties to add content, self-regulate and improve the quality of the offering. If the link situation is not resolved in the short term there is a real risk of contributors losing interest, and this may leave the market open for a competitor.

The webmaster forums and chat rooms are buzzing with claims and counter-claims with regards to the Wikipedia situation, but it does seem as though many are missing the real point. Spam is more than annoying, it is starting to have a real impact on people’s online livelihoods and income.

Will this spur the many millions of internet users to take a more hardline approach on reporting spam? Time will tell, but the internet is definitely approaching a crucial stage of the fight against spam, but who will be the long term winner?

Referral Spamming

Referral Spam or Referrer Log Spamming is another black hat way of generating backlinks for your sites.

Referral Spamming explained below:

When someone accesses a web page, i.e. the referee, by following a link from another web page, i.e. the referrer, the referee is given the address of the referer by the person’s internet browser. Some websites have a referer log which shows which pages link to that site. By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referer, that message or internet address then appears in the referer log of those sites that have referer logs. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referrer-log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer’s sites, by getting the referer logs of many sites to link to them. ~ Wikipedia Spamdexing

Try to view your traffic logs, if you noticed referrals from one or more site on which you couldn’t find your link, you have been hit by a referral spam.

Referral spamming is also a bandwidth leecher, traffic coming from this method is just a waste of hosting resources.