If you’re link spamming, you suck. If you know someone who is link spamming, they suck — and you should tell them so. If you don’t know why you suck, here’s a story about the human impact of what you do.
About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site for woman called Boudica. You won’t find anything there now. The site’s closed due to a link spamming attack and will probably never reopen.
Lorna wanted a place where women could share stories relating to women but without a predominance of “mommy” content she’d found in some other places. Not finding what she wanted, she dived into creating Boudica.
She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.
Most of her time was spent dealing with the inevitable spam attacks that a community site faces. While her site had some defenses, this latest attack was too much. Someone decided the world needed another 500+ links about discount prescription drugs.
Wiping the links out would be fast work for a programmer that knows Drupal, which her site was based on. But that’s still time and money for a small site that hasn’t generated income. Plus, the version of Drupal that she’s running really needs to be upgraded to prevent future attacks. That’s more time and money that’s not likely worth spending.
If Boudica had been more successful, doing the work would make sense. But it has remained small, and the link spam attack will probably tip her over to a decision she’s already been debating, of whether it makes sense to continue working at it. She doesn’t want to feel a failure if she abandons it; my feeling is that she’s learned much from doing it, so look at it as a building block for future success.
Still, being small doesn’t excuse the attack. Nor do other excuses that typically get trotted out carry much weight with me, such as “You get what’s coming if you don’t have strong defenses” or “it’s Google’s fault — they created the link economy that drives this demand.”
No, the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed.
Ironically, I was in a debate this week where I was sticking up for the SEO industry (see SEO FAQ That’s Not From The Land Of Unicorns). To some, that means I’m sticking up for link spamming, since they see the SEO industry as synonymous with link spam.
SEO doesn’t mean link spamming in my book. There are SEOs who also link spam, clearly. Aside from hurting individual site owners, you give the entire SEO industry a bad name. You should stop. Or call yourself something else — perhaps link spammer would be a good title?
I’ve written against link spam before. Back in 2005, I tried to get some consensus that automated link spam ought to be condemned by those in the industry overall. One example I pointed out during that campaign was Mike Grehan’s classic story of fending off link spam of a memorial web site in 2004.
Seriously, who wants to stand up in defense of dropping links on a site dedicated to a dead man?
Who wants to stand up for causing someone (me) to take time away during Thanksgiving last year to deal with link spam (see Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already)?
Who wants to stand up for killing a site that a mother was making time for in between the already full-time job of watching her kids?
In the US, we got CAN-SPAM primarily to help get junk spam email in control. It’s helped, though clearly spam email hasn’t gone away. Still, I think the time is overdue to look at updating CAN-SPAM to include link spam. I intend to explore that further.
We shouldn’t need laws as a deterrent, of course. Basic human decency ought to be enough. Those who are link spamming should be able to ask themselves one simple question about what they’re doing and know they shouldn’t go forward:
Is that the type of thing you’d be proud to tell your own mother about?
Postscript: By link spamming, by the way, I include comment spam as that’s often done solely to gain a link.
Postscript 2: Peter, below in the comments, sees this as a crybaby post. It’s not. Let me clarify a bit more, if my points above didn’t make this clear.
I’m not naive. I understand that sites should have anti-spamming filters in place. Lorna’s had some. It could have more. But I’ve also seen spam get through anti-spam filters on my own Sphinn social news site. That site employs multiple-CAPTCHA barriers, along with an array of other deterrents. It also has human moderators. Link spammers still attack it. Link spammers will attack ANYTHING out there, and nothing is foolproof. The first programmer that tells you they have a perfect anti-spam solution will soon after encounter another programmer who will blow that fallacy out of the water.
For success with a social site, or any site that allows user-generated content (such as a blog allowing comments), you have to be prepared to fight spam. Lorna expected it and has been fighting it. She could, if she wants, get this latest huge barrage of spam cleared out on Boudica and improve spam filters going forward, if she choses. She’s currently debating this. It just may be, as I explained above, that this was the thing that tips her toward closing the site, something she was already considering because of low usage.
But the main point is that decision shouldn’t be something forced upon her through an act of vandalism. That on the web, I feel we kind of accept that this type of spam happens, and you have to live with it. It does, you do — but I’m hoping for more than the usual rant that is all those impacted by it feel they have. I’m hoping in a small way that some of those who engage in these actions take a moment to think further about what they are doing. Or that perhaps some who know others who link spam will send a message out to knock it off.
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With you 100% Danny. This is why we don’t use common CMS. IMO, they will always be vulnerable to this sort of thing. Bespoke is not bullet-proof, but it’s a lot less vulnerable.
I’m sorry to hear that, Danny. I wish I had a suggestion, but I don’t. Human moderation is really the only thing that can prevent these sorts of spam links from getting through, but who has the time?
I’m sure your wife learned a valuable lesson here, and hopefully that lesson will make her next project ten times more successful.
There is always a contingent of people who will do anything for money, ethics, morals, politeness, and decency be damned. I wish it weren’t so, so that I didn’t have to spend so much time fending it off myself.
My sympathy to your wife. It must be very disheartening for her. Why are there people who are intent upon spoiling anything good and worthwhile?
Thanks Andrew and Kevin. Trust me, I know well how a non-standard CMS or human moderation can help. That’s not the point, though. While I readily acknowledge that you need defenses, it is sad that we have to have them at all. There are some people who just don’t give a damn. They’ll link spam whatever they want, rationalizing it however they want (or not even bothering). I’d like more of them to take a second thought about what they do. I’d like people who know them to start pushing them away from those actions, as well.
Put it to you this way. If you had a friend who constantly burned down buildings, eventually you might feel compelled to say that while you like being friends, the whole burning building things isn’t cool, isn’t going to fly, so they really need to change their behavior.
What a lame crybaby story. It’s bordering on linkbait.
For under $25 you prob could hire someone off odesk or guru.com to update the CMS. So you’re valuing the site at less than that!
I feel sorry for your wife too, Danny. Its absolutely not fair to her – or the many others that gets their online work destroyed.
There are many greedy idiots on the web or people that just like to act as “super trolls”. Some of them destroy good communities for links – others do it for whatever other stupid reasons they may have.
The last couple of communities that I watched slowly die didn’t suffer from comment spam created for links – in fact there was hardly iny links in the posts, but they nevertheless ended up degraded those communities to a level where they are just not usefull any more.
The only solutions I have found to work over the years are a combination of really strong moderation and the right technologies. I fully understand that both is hard – if not impossible – for many private people, such as your wife, doing great things on the web. I just, personally, haven’t found solutions that works perfectly for them.
An extension of the CAN SPAM act I don’t think is a good idea. To be honest, (as you probably know, Danny) we mostly laugh out loud over that law in most of the world outside the US – its too weak. As far as we see it it allows spam – not the opposite. In many countries in Europe you are not even allowed to send that first email.
In any case – the laws you and we both have, have not proven to be able to stop spam. What have stopped spam for me is some really good spam filters. I still get approx 1000 spam mails a day in my personal inbox but only less than a handfull slips through – often less.
I think it would be easier and faster to stop a lot of link-focused comment spam by convincing the search engines to discount it far more. The fact is that it still works. You can comment spam your way to a fortune. And its not even illegal. Why would hackers rob banks and help dictators when they an make more money this way – risk free?
And because it works some people will continue to do it. It don’t take many programmers – just a few + a good network – to comment spam all communities in the world.
Anyway, its a good discussion – so thanks for bringing it up. I am sure we will continue to have it for a while …
I feel for you and your wife. About 5 years ago i thought I would start a forum for locals here in Vermont. In no time I had to shut it down because of spam. I have learned alot since, but the feeling was awful. Many people pointed the finger at me.. That has been overcome but the thought of itis aweful.
It’s a shame that link-spammers can cause so much damage. It’s a shame they exist at all. One would hope that evolution eliminate such creatures in time, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen in our lifetimes. Until we can find a way to make spamming backfire on the spammers, it will continue.
Good point about not using a common CMS. We turned off the forums on our site (phpBB) because there was so much link spam. We have new forums ready to go up, but won’t put them live until we can make sure this isn’t a problem again.
I’m curious about how much of the spam you mentioned is from automated programs, since you said there were 500 links. Would a simple captcha have helped eliminate most of your wife’s spam links? (That is something we are hoping will work.)
“We shouldn’t need laws as a deterrent, of course. Basic human decency ought to be enough.”
You’d think!! And, sadly, as long as people continue to demand legislation to keep people from doing things to people that people already know are wrong – there will always be BIG government.
Julie – the main problem with most web publishing software is that it is very hard to update if you are not a programmer. And as comment spammers – and other intruders, evolve so will the software security have to too.
Capcha’s used to be a pretty solid method for keeping comment spammers out but now there are many capcha breaking programs out there and other tricky methods. Today you need a rule based system with several security checks. Capchas can still be one of them.
It took WordPress many years to get to the automated updating system they have now. But they have it now and it works great to make sure users of that software always have the latest version.
Obviously the people who do this are not going to be shamed out of doing this. Most of the link and comment spams are probably bot-generated anyway. But the deeper issue is more like tragedy of the commons. Thought you put your soul and passion into a website, if it’s public, it’s public. And that means people are going to walk right over your flowers, stopping long enough to grind them beneath their feet.
It’ll only stop when the action is no longer profitable, usually when you get saturation- grim, isn’t it? Laws unlikely to pass and nearly impossible to enforce. Unlikely police will ever trace them down to individuals. But one thing that can be done, if someone can create a tool that’ll trace links back, making it easier to identify individuals who do these things – but if they are in India, Russia, China or North Korea, neener neener neener. And if CMS’s get plugins and tools to catch them – Wordpress has some measures built in.
if this keeps up looks like a job description should be added – link killer. sorry to hear about your wife, bad things to good people not right!
Peter, I’m not a crybaby. I oversee a community site with sophisticated anti-spamming tools in place. That’s not the point. You’ve clearly missed it.
What is the point of going on about this despicable practice, the people who do it are too ignorant to do anything else and the authorities simply don’t care.
Danny , Firstly I feel for your wife…as a mother working part time on this..do mums get any free time?? …this really sucks. Peters comments are ridiculous and I suppose are typical of the type of people we are trying to fight against. Also Dennis.. to answer your comment…there is a point as we are the majority and on the net community rules…..we have the voice and the backing of thousands…..there must be a way we can combat against this….but until then I hope you find a way to fight back and get that site back up and running……any help I can give let me know
Mark
I agree 100% about the problem with link spam. The other month I decided that I wanted to learn more about running a forum so I spent a couple weeks setting up the permissions the design of the site the categories and got it working well, only to be attacked daily with hundreds of link spam. It was a phpBB site with the captcha’s in place so that cut down on the auto spam but there were still at least 20+ comments a day in each category that was human link spam. I didnt even get a chance to put real content on the site before I decided I didnt have enough time to deal with all this BS and shut down the forum.
The problem is that people dont see it as anything wrong because they are only looking to make a quick buck. And if only 2% of your sites visitors click on these links then that means these spammers have to submit thousands a day just to help make some money.
Blame infomercials telling people how to make millions on the internet and most of them are promoting the “idea” of link spamming as a way for you to make sales. Or the poorer countires who we pay pennies to a day for people to just send out these links and fill out these captchas so they can feed their families.
When it comes down to it, telling someone not to put a “harmless link” on someones site when it stands in the way of money or food, well people are always still going to do it.
This is so unfortunate. Imagine how many sites have suffered similar burdens — but have no channel to call attention to the abuse!
A good friend recently saw the demise of her site due to similar forces. A bit like Boudica, it focused on an underserved audience, offering free materials for teachers and social workers worldwide. The focus was on non-religious meditative tools and practices, to aid children in gaining emotional and intellectual focus. Non-profit; volunteer; open source. They were forced offline by a constant flow of thoughtless and pointless crap from a very focused crew of abusers. It’s truly unconscionable behavior.
Even internal peer pressure can fail to deter a dedicated troublemaker. We have what amounts to the ultimate captcha at Googlewhack.com: you need to find a Googlewhack before you can post a comment! But, one of the old-time regulars still figured out a way to irritate and anger everyone else who enjoys the site.
He decided privately that it was “too easy” for other people — especially newcomers — to find a whack. So, he gathered what he considered “easy” words from the last 2,000 whacks. He posted them all on one page of his blog, largely eliminating most prospects for the most popular words. The rest of the regulars give him bloody hell every time he appears on The Whack Stack, condemning him for ruining so many others’ fun, and asking him to take down his disruptive blog posting.
I’ve IP-blocked him several times, for several days, when he becomes abusive toward others or the service itself. I’ve blacklisted his blog, so it won’t generate non-organic whacks. But, he contaminated the workspace for hundreds of words, thus limiting the enjoyment of many people, every single day.
Here’s a laugh: he now complains that HE is the victim of a “mentality” — which is really a collective culture evolved through millions of visitors, hundreds of thousands of users (and whacks), tens of thousands of inbound links, and everything from research papers to off-Broadway shows. Eight years of free (and entirely non-profit) enjoyment — for people from a dozen countries joking and relaxing every day — and one guy corrupts it because he doesn’t “like” how other people use it. Wow!
Yes, a different scenario, with different motives and results, but just as selfish and thoughtless toward the community and those who would serve it. (Luckily, I have enough control of the internals to tweak the program and configuration, and stay online.) When Danny decries a lack of “basic human decency,” and the work lost to it, I’m struck by the parallels…
Danny, I would’ve also said this was a bit of a crybaby post because the technology is out there to thwart this nonsense but I see your wife more of a victim of software developers that don’t properly secure their product and could give a rats ass about the amount of mental anguish they cause the users of their products.
Captcha’s aren’t the only solution, they’re just one solution, as well as obfuscating the forms in javascript so the bots can’t find them, as well as making the page name something random for each submission, as well as random field names so spammers can’t detect it, as well as validating user agents for validity, etc., etc.
For instance this very comment submit form is so easy to find it just cries SPAM ME!
form action=”/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php” method=”post” id=”commentform”
Yup, that’ll slow them spammers down.
The form action could be “syz1849sw.102″ or some garbage number tracked in a session meaning that only the session holder can submit to that page.
Of course the bots can also hold sessions but making them read a page first before attempting to spam a page, assuming they knew that random page number was a page to spam in the first place, requires slowing the spammers actions by 50% to process two actions instead of one and slowing them down means half the spam
As long as all the sheep keep using crap software and depend on many of the laughable anti-spam solutions out there, this kind of thing will just keep happening.
The truly sad thing is that the technology required to stop the spammers also tends to stop the accessibility software used by the visually impaired so we go round and round with the bad guys because the people making tools for the visually impaired can’t keep up with technology.
I have to say that people overreact sometimes… if your wife’s website started to taking off it will not be killed by any spammer on this world. There will be enough founds to have part time developer/administrator/consultant or on the end you know I was deleting 300-500 posts on the forum and review pages by hand… busting it out till worked out.
I am not negative I also hate spammers from the bottom of my heart because of them I have learned how to protect forms with ajax, cookies, sessions, javascript… even still able to protect my website without engaging capcha… but it made me better programer, I am on the front line and do not whining… what I hate meore than link spammers are whiners.
One more thing… if your wife website would not get some of juicy links thanks to your huge authority it would not have high page rank and most probably would not be so high on the target list of spammers.
I am big fan of Darwin theory of evolution on the web… evolve or die.
Thanks for the post and I’m sorry about your wife’s site. I’m glad to see most of these comments, especially Mikkel’s. And to some of the other comments — I wish we could agree to blame abuse on the abusers, and not shift the primary blame to others. Danny, you’re one of the most influential figures in the SEO industry, and I think you’ve always done a good job of promoting ethical SEO. There was a recent video where Matt Cutts and Michael Gray got together and called on SEOs not to trash other people’s sites. It’s easy to laugh at those efforts as silly, but sometimes it can be helpful to have some clarity of what’s unacceptable. I never worried at SMX that somebody would steal my wallet, but I definitely worry that some of these people will trash my site. Let’s say we ignore the perhaps ethically gray area of “Black Hat” tactics that don’t directly trash other people’s hard work, is there more the SEO community can do, perhaps in partnership with the search engines, to fight the vandalism you’re talking about?
Danny, sorry for your wife’s site, it looks like some SEO’s started evolving since that rant last week (I certainly have), unfortunately too many people call themselves SEO’s and do these kind of things that simply pollute and kill the internet. Thanks for sharing your thoughts… its an inspiration.
Thanks for a post citing a real world example of how these link spammers are hurting legitimate sites. I also appreciated your Land of Unicorns post, and I would like to see legitimate SEO people as a whole work on destroying the myth that link spammers and SEO are one and the same. They aren’t.
Danny, you are spot-on. I also am experiencing this heinous behavior with a social learning site, and have to spend time almost daily to weed out link spam. On some levels, it’s a “oh well what can you do this is life” sort of situation, since many link spammers out there are rooted in this behavior and won’t change. Hopefully, your plea will reach those (like Anakin Skywalker) who are dancing on the edge of the dark side and don’t realize they are slipping in the wrong direction.
Well link spam will not stop anytime soon and you can do nothing about it. As someone pointed out above human moderation is the only way out but I image this for a big site
Just open GAF and check out the job postings for captcha submissions – the rates are about $0.60 per 1000 captchas done with a min of 2000 daily, and some captcha entry teams are offering up to 40000 captcha submissions per day. Spam will always exist and you can do nothing about it 
Danny,
I am really sorry when it happens to an entrepreneur, in this case your own wife, that develops a good idea related to a social community site.
I suffered my own link spam in one client blog and thanks to Wordpress plugin such as Akismet, I got most of the problem solved but it takes time to sort the right plugin out.
Please tell your wife not to give up with internet entrepreneurship specially in this times !!
Good Regards from Spain
There are plenty of mothers, fathers, students, people working full-time while also part-time on web projects, and they don’t let something like spam stop them. And can we preach to and blame the vandals for robbing the business that we built in a high crime area, and didn’t bother to secure. We know spammers exist and will never be stopped so who’s fault is it? Maybe she should give it another go with the proper steps taken.
I wonder if commenter “Building Materials Supplies” read the blog post.
Firstly, I sympathise. I really do.
>> SEO doesn’t mean link spamming in my book.
Agreed, but the problem is that link spamming is easier than SEO, and works just as well a lot of the time. That’s the SEs fault for making fundamentally stupid decisions about how SEs work. And the vunerability of Drupal (or any software package, for that matter) is the result of developers not knowing any better, or not caring enough to do better.
>> Seriously, who wants to stand up in defense of dropping links on a site dedicated to a dead man?
Excellent point, but sadly, it’s the wrong question to have asked. Sites that allow UGC get link spam, it might as well be a law of nature, like gravity. It needs neither advocacy nor defending, it will just happen whatever you or I think of it, because it has value (in monetary terms, at least).
… I was going to do a long rant here, but just like moaning about spammers, it wouldn’t solve anything. I just can’t believe I’m even reading this article from you of all people Danny.
If this was meant to be link bait, then well… I guess it kinda worked. I see no other real reason for it being here.
I hate spammers too, but I totally agree with Peter!
Sorry Danny, but the idea “CAN-SPAM to include link spam” is really ridiculous … If someone decide to put you in trouble, he can just spam on your behalf (with links to your site). So that measure is not the answer to tell the truth …
This entire situation is unfortunate, but is quite common. Several years ago, I started a site using the Pligg platform. Less than a year after opening the site, the daily spam and nonsense became too much and w/ little to no income being generated, I faced the same thing Danny’s wife is now – so I shut it down.
While shutting it down made sense financially, I did enjoy the experience and learned from it. That said, I do believe it was valuable to the community and feel bad that a resource (like it) it not available any longer.
If it is your passion, defend it & fix it. If it is an experiment or other time waster, let it go & grow from it.
IncrediBILL, I’ve tried to explain in the postscript (and thought I’d explained in the original story) that this isn’t about having the correct defenses in place. This post isn’t aimed at the webmaster who is starting a site and doesn’t have those up. They should, obviously. Lorna also had some in place. But this is aimed at those who actually do link spamming to try and get them to take a second thought.
Look, I know about defenses. Sphinn has layers and layers of them. This comment form? It’s fairly open to you, but behind the scenes, I’ve got over 2,000 pieces of spam blocked in the past week or so. I’m not running the standard WordPress spam blocker — I’ve added SpamKarma2. I’ve also tweaked that behind the scenes. I’ve blocked IPs. I’m at a good level right now. If it gets worse, I’ll ramp it up, perhaps to require registration as I used to.
But I or anyone shouldn’t have to do any of this, any more than a store owner shouldn’t have to put those security tags on merchandise. But people steal, so you have to. But we also, as a society, take a strong negative view toward stealing. People wouldn’t brag or talk about how they make their living by stealing (except perhaps to other thieves). People generally wouldn’t consider stealing as an acceptable career choice. But we have people who do view link spamming as acceptable behavior, “anything goes.”
So to you and others focusing on the defense aspect, understood. Got that. Knew that already. I want you to focus on something different, the human deterrence that needs to be out there, in terms of unacceptance. We could use more of that as well as the tech fixes.
Zoran, I add you to the list of people not getting it that this isn’t about whining. And oh, her site actually didn’t have much authority. But no need to actually read or research before commenting, I suppose, right?
Martin, similar to what I said before, I know CAPTCHAs can help. But they don’t stop it all, which I also know from my experience on Sphinn. Layers and layers, and we still need a staff of human moderators to keep it under control. Time is cheap for some people.
Darrenz, I’ll try to make this clear again. Her site hasn’t been that successful. She’s been pondering closing it before this happened. This was just a tipping point. It took a decision away from her, because someone decided to dump a load of garbage on her property. She might restart it; she might not. But she (nor anyone) shouldn’t have those decisions taken from them.
And yes, to anyone, understand — have security, don’t whine if you don’t have it, got it. Developers should build better blocks into their software, yes. I agree. I know this. I know this stuff cold. I’m not looking for those saying this to preach to the choir.
This isn’t a post about how you shouldn’t have security. This is a post asking those who spam to think about the human pain they can cause.
Because you know, when you’re building a web site for a dead friend, as was the case with Mike Grehan, top of your mind is how you’d better make sure you block the spam.
John, I think a little attention to the human aspect isn’t moaning and is worthwhile from time to time. Sorry you disagree.
Lukas, I think there might be ways to look at laws to prevent this. They wouldn’t be perfect, as CAN-SPAM isn’t. There’s potential for misuse, if not handled correctly. But I wouldn’t mind having a legal threat out there as a further deterrent.
Agree with you that link spamming sucks. Looking in the spam folder of my email makes me believe that your statement that CAN-SPAM has “helped” with email spam is dubious at best…
Danny,
I am sorry to hear this. I had a similar issues last year with iframe injection viruses which took down two profitable sites I ran which were on the WordPress platform. Given that they were not my primary source of income, I just have not been able to put the time an energy into rebuilding them – which really stinks as one was a very profitable niche site. It did, however, get me to investigate some better options for securing my WordPress sites, but of course, in a perfect world, we would not need such defenses.
I do hope that your wife is able to recover her site and revive her community.
~ Anthony
Welcome to the club.. I’ve shut down plenty of sites due to spam.. And all of them were not making much, if any, money, just good ideas or something fun to do.. The sites I care about I take the time to secure.. Or help my wife secure hers.. I’m sure you could have offered to help yours rather than give up
Isn’t there a good solution for this (not great)? Can’t you use a simple captcha and some IP banning and take care of 90% of the problem? I’m not being a smart-ass, I just want to know what I’m missing, so I can learn something from the experience. It would be really nice to hear the specifics. Did they come from all different IP addresses? Did you implement captcha and they got around it, etc?
Added after reading your latest post,
Expecting spammers not to spam unsecured sites because it is ‘wrong’ is like leaving the front door of your house open and expecting criminals not to steal your stuff because it is ‘wrong’.. Laws don’t stop them, proper security slows them down.. You will get a lot of people agreeing with you, but you’ll never get the spammers to back down, its easy money to them and they simply don’t care about us..
Kevin, I think her site had basic registration requirements. Until now, that was fine. She had spam, but it was something that took a little time to deal with each day. This was a mass onslaught. In her case, as I said, she could get it cleaned out and also get the software overall upgraded to add a CAPTCHA and some other tools. She might. As I’ve also said, she was already debating continuing the site to begin with. This might just push her to keeping it closed permanently. It’s just a decision that should have been left to her.
Over at Sphinn, we have CAPTCHA (multiple ones, I think). Requirements of things you need to do before you can post at all. We’re not using off-the-shelf software (we dumped Pligg earlier this year, and the version we were running was heavily modified). We have an array of tools to auto-detect spam. And people still do spam manually. Time is cheap for some people. So we also have human review as a backup, with yet more array of tools designed to completely wipe out accounts, ban IP addresses and so on.
Steve, got it. And I’ll just say it again, I’m NOT saying people should expect some unicorns and fairy world where they don’t need to lock doors because there aren’t spammers.
Yes, you need security. YES, YOU NEED SECURITY. I KNOW THIS. I’m typing big not out of upset just simply to maybe catch people who keep missing that I’ve said this.
But you know, it’s not just laws and security that keep people from breaking laws in the real world. Many of us encounter opportunities where we could steal safely. But we don’t, because on top of everything else, society generally frowns upon it. That’s a deterrent, as well.
That’s all I’m saying here. To those criminals out there who might stumble across this, or to those who might know them, you do damage. You might not realize the damage you do. Maybe you haven’t cared about it. But you ought to, and perhaps this will make you think more.
Realistically, I’m not expecting a change. It’s hard enough to get some of the good-hearted people commenting here to look beyond the “you should have better security” aspect. Getting actual criminals to think differently is an extreme long-shot. But sometimes, you want to try.
Danny, you are fundamentally too nice, even after all this time. But at least you try. I’m considerably more cynical than you, I suspect. You’re hoping that people can rise above their own natures. Maybe one day… but probably not today, sorry. I always thought that the www was a very human place, not the tech dream that many see it as. This whole thread simply makes me more certain that it true
> I think a little attention to the human aspect isn’t moaning and is worthwhile from time to time.
Danny, this is exactly why some of us love you so much. You are just such a good person by nature and you really want the world to turn better. I do too
I just really don’t like going the legal way on this – because most of the legal restrictions I can think of would hurt legitimate businesses and individuals so much more than any Russian spammer.
I do think that a better way is to remove as many incentives as possible. Lets start with the major search engines (have them discount link spam better – they CAN if they want!), then move on to contextual advertising networks (partly the engines again), affiliate and banner networks that makes it really profitable to link spam.
When there is nothing left to gain from link spam it WILL slow down. And only then.
>this is aimed at those who actually do link spamming to try and get them to take a second thought.
You’re howling at the moon, Danny. But while you’re at it, how about getting rid of the paid blog anchor text, too?
Danny, I would love to agree with you.. I really would, but I’m far to cynical to ever think anything will ever slow it down.. Even on the Sphinn home page there is a link to an article called “Buy Text Link Ads With These 101 Sneaky Tips On Paid Links”.. I don’t think that its logical to think that you can complain about spammers not following the rules when one of your own sites promotes what many others think is just as evil..
Removing pagerank from the toolbar will help.. SEs being more aggressive at devaluing link spam would really help.. Convincing users to report those posts rather than click on them will help.. Improving security will help.. It is nice to think more laws would help, but they won’t.. The guys that are doing this simply don’t care about us.. They never will.. DeCaptcher and Xrumer are proof of that..
Gotta be clearer than that RC. Which paid blog anchor text? Or are you just talking in general?
If the site was so small, why wasn’t she using mod approval for comments? Maybe grant a few good users with a bit more time on their hands comment-moderation privileges (and posting privileges?)
Sure, a constant arms race with them with purely technological methods could result in success, but human moderation is effectively a guarantee.
That said: I do wish you good luck trying to reduce the amount of link spam out there. Even a 20% reduction would make the web suck less.
I’m not clear what the value is in link spamming? Most sites I have seen apply the “nofollow” modifier to user-contributed links, which, as I understand, prevents it from affect page rank. So what’s the value in doing this? That the site’s viewers will click through? Sounds tenous. Clear it up for me, what’s the motive?
Steve, Sphinn’s a community site where people discuss articles. That’s different than actually publishing them. Most of the discussion right now is from people who think those are good tips. I’ve no doubt there are people who disagree with them and who might also speak up.
Also, it’s important to distinguish between paid links and link spamming. Google says buying paid links is bad. Not everyone agrees, including Bing which official kind of frowns on them but doesn’t rule them out. Some people want to buy links and have good arguments why they feel they want to break Google’s rules. The wise people who do this also don’t complain if they get caught.
Link spamming isn’t the same as paid links, not in my book. They are separate activities. With link spamming, you’re dropping links on a web site without adding any value to that site, without any purpose behind it other than to get a link. Whereas there’s a healthy debate over paid links, there are few people who stick up for link spamming. There are plenty of “black hat” folks who hate link spam as much as “white hat” people.
So my post isn’t about following rules but more about not being a jerk. I’m not worried about whether link spamming is against Google’s rules or not. Those discussions, I know from experience, go nowhere. It’s about the fact that link spamming just sucks, rules regardless.
Mikkel, as for the focus on the major search engines as if they have the solution, they don’t. That’s what nofollow was supposed to be about. I have nofollow on the outgoing links in comments here. That doesn’t stop people from manually spamming. I just had to delete a comment in this post for that very reason.
They are part of it, of course. Site owners need to have good security. The search engines or others who fund sites that earn off link spam need to crack down on those sites, so they can’t earn. And we need more of an attitude change through the web about it. I think plenty of attention has been focused on the first two. I just thought it was time for a little attention on the last one, the human side.
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