Oh, those wily Viagra spammers!
Their no-holds-barred marketing campaigns have provided cheap pills and thrills for the young and old who most desperately need some. But they have also managed to forever associate Pfizer's breakthrough drug brand with spam.
A few months back, rogue Viagra dealers were penetrating top of the SERP's by
parasite hosting on .edu sites. They would hack a
last-updated-in-'97 Native American languages forum, bribe a library assistant with a month's salary, or offer a frathouse a truckload of magic blue pills in order to get their hands on a linkjuice-engorged .edu page that they could redirect to their "pharmacy" site.
Google seems to have cleaned most of the .edu parasite pages out of the top Viagra rankings, so they've moved on to deeper strongholds.
Popular social media sites like
Digg and
Reddit host a constant stream of fresh content and traffic, so they enjoy enviably high PageRank.
Most of the spamming on these sites is people submitting commercial stories and trying to make them popular in hopes of a brief burst of traffic and some backlinks.
The lowest rung of social media spammer is the newbie who submits blatantly commercial headlines without knowing any better. For their effort, they get a worthless link and they might even get a click or two for before the story gets voted out.
The slightly more sophisticated spammer tries to actually get votes and make their "story" popular:
The user Katbo (according to his profile has
zero Diggs, zero friends, two submission and
two made popular!) most likely got his press release to the home page by purchasing random Diggs from a blackhat pay-for-votes service, orchestrating sock-puppet accounts, or by soliciting friends to vote via e-mail.
Recently I came across a more effective, outside-the-box approach of spamming by using Digg and Reddit for parasite hosting. Here's from the page one SERP at Google for "buy Viagra":
By creating a keyword targeted page or profile on a strong, legitimate social media domain and pointing several hundred spammy backlinks at it, they were able to pump their link up to the top of Google for an uber-competitive query.
Schwing! Some impressive (but short term) performance enhancement.
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July 22nd, 2007 at 9:07 am
As clear as you think this article is - it’s not. I can’t understand what you mean and I am not slow to catch on. Try a step by step explanation. Yes, you understand it and the few other geeks you interact with may do but most general readers simply say ‘huh’
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:14 am
huh?
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:45 am
How could you not understand this? Are you retarded? Reread the article or get a native English speaker to help you.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:50 am
What is to explain? Some makes a reddit profile, post some spammy link, make some spammy text and then point some spammy linkn to it’s posts/comments. As google is stupid enough to give trust to social sites, those profiles/comments get ranked for most competitive markets.
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
Huh?
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
Sorry if the article was a little unclear, Steve… I was writing it for an SEO-savvy audience and included some technical acronyms and some cryptic humor.
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Steve Bildermann, you are an idiot.
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:58 pm
It’s attitudes like Alex’s, Dracula and Greg that make it difficult for people who don’t already know to learn. I see your type all the time on places like b.net and WoW. Instead of being jerks, try helping someone out. Who knows, you might enjoy it.
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Rabbit, I disagree completely. It’s the “I don’t understand, spoon feed me!” attitude that prevents learning. Some simple research and effort would explain this article for anyone who doesn’t already understand it.
Or, in other words, learning.
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Even though I understood what was written, had I not seen the two spam articles in question I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known why this article was posted. The writing was clear enough, but more context would have helped. And if one or two people wrote, you can be sure another hundred or two, at least, were mystified but passed on without comment.
I figured that since it was on Reddit it had to be legit, even though it bore all the hallmarks of spam. Interesting to see how it was pushed through. Thanks.
August 4th, 2007 at 1:34 am
< <spam comment deleted>>
January 15th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
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March 24th, 2008 at 8:44 am
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