Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Link spamming targets

May 14, 2007 on 10:05 am | In Blackhat SEO |

I seem to hear from a lot of people who seem to have their heart set on spamming but simply have no idea where to start. Generally you will find that if you have an idea of where you could link spam then so have a hundred over people but don’t let this put you off! The links will still be of value.

There are many many places to spam and in this post i’ll try and go through some of them.

Trackback spamming - Trackbacks are generally used on blogs to let another blog know you have written about one of their posts. For example if you liked a post written by Anne on the Spamhuntress blog and decided to post about it on your own blog then you’d send a trackback(your blog software will usually do this automatically) to the specific post on the Spamhuntress blog, the blogs way of saying “Hey, I have blogged about what you have written.”. There will now be a link from the post on Spamhuntress back to your own post. Now it is obvious to see how this system can be abused, you can send a trackback with the URL of your own post being any spam site you like and not even blog the topic. Many people however have security now days which check that your suposed URL is actually linking to their blog and such like. Some people go to the length of creating cloaked blogs to trick trackback checks but others just spam in such bulk that it doesn’t matter if only 50% of their trackbacks stick.

Guestbook spamming - I don’t know many people who havn’t tried their hand at guestbook spamming. You may remember DITY which was a free guestbook spammer I created and is still widely used. Generally people will search around to find out which guestbooks are popular and then find footprints which allow them to find large amounts of people using them on search engines. For example if the guestbook always said “Powered by SpamBook Pro” then it would make for an easy scrape. Whilst this can be an effective method of building up links, it is a hugely saturated practice now with every man and his dog spamming guestbooks.

Blog Comments - Comment spamming on blogs has really taken off in the last couple of years. Since there are only a handful of popular blogging packages such as wordpress and movable type it means it is extremely easy to hit thousands upon thousands of blogs without modification to your code. Whilst there have been huge advancements in anti-spam plugins there are still such a large amount of unprotected blogs that it can really pay off to use this method. Many people comment on older posts in the hope that admins will not notice. Another trick is to scrape someone elses comment and then use just a small part of it in the hope the admin doesn’t look too closely and thinks its genuine.

Directory Submission - You can automate the submission of your sites to directories which is a very easy way to help get a site indexed. It’s not generally a mass solution but it can help.

Referral Spamming - Each time you visit a website, your browser sends a referral tag which tells the website where you just came from. For example if you were to goto google and click through to this website (you wouldn’t because this site is banned on google) then my stats software would log that you came in from google.com. Many people makes these statistics open to the public and search engines meaning you can trick thousands of websites into thinking you came to them from your own spamsite.com which will then show as a link back to your site in their stats pages.

A few more to look into but I don’t have time to write about right now:

Social bookmarking

Social networking sites (myspace etc)

Classifieds

Article submissions