Big Dan's Corner

Is simply to make the most money with the least amount of energy. Whether it be email spammers, link spammers, or search engine spammers they’re all the same. In lots of ways it’s no different than any wise businessman keeping overhead as low as possible and maximizing profits is just good business sense.

However most spammers aren’t business men. We have come to think of them as scum of the earth. The main reason we think of spammers as scum of the earth is because they use other people’s hard work for their own gain. Look at sblogs (spam blogs) who often scrape others blogs and then ping the blog back vying for a track back in the blog’s comments they stole content from. I see these all the time in my wordpress spam. Most bloggers spend time writing and researching posts and along comes a spammer to copy the posts word for word and then try and get a link from the original poster.

Forum spammers come in four varieties:

1. Some register and post a bunch of spam right off the bat; this is the easiest to combat for moderators simply delete the posts, ban the user, and IP.
2. Others register and masquerade as a regular member, often posting decent content and after a while start dropping their own links in posts. These are the hardest to manage because in some respects they do contribute arguably good content but the link spam is a problem. Who knows where those links are going to wind up going in the future. Is your average member going to be tricked into clicking the link and winding up in some kind of trouble?
3. Post Padders/Sig Spammers: These are especially prevalent on webmaster’s forums that limit signature links to members with more than X posts. A new member will sign up and post a slew of one liners in order to get up the number of posts required to have a signature then 1 of 2 things will happen either they will create a signature and never come back again or will stay there posting nothing useful just to increase the number of times their signature is shown. Post padders do nothing but waste your member base’s time by having them read through the drivel. Forum admins are split over this some will let it go on because it inflates their member and post numbers thus makes them seem busier and gets them better advertising rates other like myself are more strict and delete the posts then warn the member.
4. Cookie Stuffers: Also prevalent on webmasters forums. The spammer will embed a 1×1 transparent image that puts a cookie on the users computer. Most often cookie stuffing is done with eBay and hosting companies with affiliate programs that depend on user’s cookies to credit the affiliates account with a percentage of the sale. Cookie stuffers are really hard to spot and often the only way to catch them is by viewing the posts in plain text some how. When I see a post padder on a vB forum I always search for more posts by that user the search results page shows a snippet of each post in plain text. If the spammer is lazy and stupid, as most are the image shows in image tags right in the beginning of the post.

Search Engine Spammers are simple they try and game the search engine to display their spam blog, made for adsense site, or affiliate site first in the listings. Search engine spammers are for the search engines to deal with and there isn’t much decent webmaster’s can do about it.

Now for something that’s going to probably get me a lot of nasty emails: What’s the difference between a spammer and internet marketer? Not much. Decent marketers don’t cookie stuff of course but decent hardworking internet marketers are what keep the internet going they spend money to make money by hiring other people to work for them with site development, graphics, and copy writing. Pay for ad campaigns, buy domains, and usually have information on their site in addition to plugs for products. Without internet marketers the internet would probably be a very boring dull place. If any thing all marketers add a certain spice to things.