How to Use Spammers to Find Sites to Spam
For those of you who read things I write, I hardly ever give any blackhat advice. I do try to keep up on the latest blackhat techniques to know where I think the algorithms will need to change. However, since I run a blog, I must deal with the spam that people try to sneak onto my blog. I have been getting a lot more lately as my site begins to grow.
I have been getting a lot of spam lately from a spammer leaving their mark as "Megaaaaamer" and then dropping in plenty of spam filled links and thought I would see how much spam this person it getting through. Why did I do this? To see if this spam not only gets through, but if it help the sites it advertises. Then, if it does help, why can't I just do the same thing and boost the rankings for a spammy affiliate site. Again, why do this? This will help me to better evaluate the different search algorithms and also learn a whole lot more about the dark side of the industry, the guys we unfortunately must deal with.
So while I know this will upset people who see me as a spammer, but hey, its my blog and this is simple stuff. I just want to show a way for people to appreciate the work of the spammer - (ok, not really but I have been needing to put up a new post).
How To Spam by Following the Spammers:
Ok, so after receiving plenty of spam from "Megaaaaamer", I first did a Google search for this phrase to see how many others were being spammed from this same bot. Sure enough Google found almost 25,000 results for this odd phrase. Ok, so this shows me that this spammer is actually making it onto other sites.
Next, I took a look at the search results. The first two are obviously sites that this spammer was trying to get ranked either because they owned it or had more spammy links on it as it was the link for his name on the comments. I clicked the first one (admiralcarinsuranc.tripod.com) and came to a page full of spammy links. To my surprise I found that it had a PR3. Odd that a site that had gained PageRank only from comment spam and was full of spammy links could have a decent PR but I guess I didn't realize how well spam can work when done "properly".
Next, I ran backlink checks at Google, Yahoo & MSN. Of course, Yahoo always is the best indicator of backlinks so I checked these out first. The first link to this spammy site was coming from John Battelle's Searchblog. After looking through the comments for someone spamming back to admiralcarinsuranc.tripod.com and found a predictable "It's Good Nice site!" comment by Alexy (I wonder if this Russian is any relation to the famous email spamming Alexy...).
So what does this tell me? First off, while the page is nofollowed, it does have a PR4 and we know that Nofollow doesn't really work. This site would be a prime target for comment spam. So, what next after I leave my own comment spam on this site? Go back to the Yahoo backlinks and continue to find the sites that the spammer penetrated and add your own spam link.
Yes, this is aweful. No, I don't do it. Yes, it works for now. However, if it was that easy for me, don't you think some algorithms are in the making to watch for these same things also?
In conclusion, I do not endorse this technique, but if you really want to waste weeks doing this just to get a PR3 site, by all means, go ahead. Otherwise, stay away and do as I do, and hope that the search engines can figure this stuff out and keep my inbox from filling up with these dumb comments from Megaaaaamer.