[web] Spammers? And why?
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I've noticed several users of my forums who seem to post short, only barely related replies to random threads. An example is a reply to a Happy Birthday thread for Ziech. The reply was "Happy Birthday ChefX you beast you. Post up some pics of you eating some cake."
It seems harmless, but I'm wondering why would anyone do that? (Or, more correctly probably, why would someone develop a bot to do that?) Can anyone shed some light on this?
I "met" bots in the past with posts that even made sense, and a very innocent looking signature, like "r4 software". Some days later, when the posting was forgotten, the text in the signature suddenly was linked with some typical spam website.
So perhaps this is the case here.
So perhaps this is the case here.
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Yes, that makes sense. They aren't getting much from my not very busy site, but I guess it's "free" for them, since the posts must be automated.
We occasionally get spammers here with an extremely limited grasp of English, basically trying to riff off above posts without actually understanding them. Like, they'll reply to a thread like this with "Yes, that's great, I also look forward to wondering why would anyone do that?". It might be bots, but the IPs are always Chinese, so I think it's more likely some guy who actually does have only a very limited grasp of english, working off some phrases he's been given and trying to make them sound topical. Your spammer there may have found that thread solely by Googling for "happy birthday AND forum", because he has some Happy Birthday responses.
The more pages a link is in, the higher ranking the page linked gets in Google, so even if no one clicks it, if the Google bot sees it, it is enough to score some points for it at the Google database.
Quote:Original post by KwizatzMy understanding is that this hasn't been the case for quite some time - or at least it isn't as straightforward as that. Google obviously isn't very forthcoming about their search ranking algorithms, but several hints they have dropped seemed to indicate that they have pretty much fixed the 'link farm' issue.
The more pages a link is in, the higher ranking the page linked gets in Google...
Of course, that doesn't mean the link spammers have cottoned on to the change yet...
Author
Quote:Original post by swiftcoderQuote:Original post by KwizatzMy understanding is that this hasn't been the case for quite some time - or at least it isn't as straightforward as that. Google obviously isn't very forthcoming about their search ranking algorithms, but several hints they have dropped seemed to indicate that they have pretty much fixed the 'link farm' issue.
The more pages a link is in, the higher ranking the page linked gets in Google...
Of course, that doesn't mean the link spammers have cottoned on to the change yet...
Or they are just going for clicks in any way that they can.
I suspect that page ranking still uses the links from other sites in some way. It has obviously been modified recently, because pages appearing during searches are noticeably different now than they once were.
(So having a link to my site in my signature doesn't help my page ranking, or does it?)
Quote:Original post by ID Merlin
(So having a link to my site in my signature doesn't help my page ranking, or does it?)
I think it does, but not as much as if it was in the front page, it is not the only metric they have in order to allocate ranking points, like swiftcoder said, it is not as straight forward as that, but even if insignificant, you will get some SE notoriety, at the very least, your page will get visits from the Google bot [smile].
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Quote:Original post by KwizatzQuote:Original post by ID Merlin
(So having a link to my site in my signature doesn't help my page ranking, or does it?)
I think it does, but not as much as if it was in the front page, it is not the only metric they have in order to allocate ranking points, like swiftcoder said, it is not as straight forward as that, but even if insignificant, you will get some SE notoriety, at the very least, your page will get visits from the Google bot [smile].
I see search bots scanning my site all the time. (I run AdSense, so I get that bot also.) It's been around long enough that all the big engines, and several smaller (unknown to me), scan it regularly as well.
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