SE Spammer Revealed

[Bill]

Originally Posted by JohnnyR

why does this guy have the lyrics paravan? I don't get it. Is he tricking the SEs in some way with it?

Well, to explain that I'm going to have to make a few guesses, but my guesses are probably pretty close to the truth.

The "holy grail" for a script spammer like this is to get control of a high PR mainstream domain like this one WITHOUT triggering the devaluation penalty that google applies to recently transferred names.

There are two ways to do this - one is to convince someone to turn over a domain to you without changing the name of the registrant.

The second is to buy a name, then let it sit for a year without changing the content, to get around the approximately 4-8 month long penalty that google applies.

Then, you use scripts to generate tons of fake content, and use the original domains high PR to get the pages pushed ahead of everyone elses actual content pages.

So, he's done something on that order. There are other possibilities, but the two I mentioned are the most common.

It's easier to buy a mainstream domain with high PR, nobody with an adult domain with high PR would sell it cheaply.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by JohnnyR

Bill, I belive you have something in mind... wanna share?

Well, I've been thinking a lot about the implications of the possibility that the Google spamreport page actually works, when you use the right reporting techniques.

Suppose all we webmasters, especially the small linklist owners, spent a couple hours a month researching and reporting spam networks using these special techniques?

In theory, the spam networks would start collapsing _much faster_. All of our pages would rise in the results and the surfers would be happier because they haven't been harrassed by spammers and toolbar installers and the like.

Happy surfers spend money. The hundreds of signups these guys are taking from our pockets become ours again.

I mention small linklist owners becuase they would, in theory, benefit the most. They are using a centralized search engine strategy, but they can't compete head to head with GG or penisbot or Jays. The spots they can get with the centralized strategy are the ones most easily attacked by script spammers. So, the struggling small LL owners would probably see actual cash benefits the quickest...

Like I said, a new business model, based on the concept of attacking the spam networks to get our spots back.

[Rorschach]

No offence but IMHO you will struggle to make a dent...

All SE spammers work on the assumption that their shit's going to get banned sooner rather than later, and if you're smart then you'll build everything different so it's difficult to catch algorithmically... all those combined man hours of trying to report spam are nullified by running the script a few more times. It's a simple equation of money in vs. money out... time is not a factor for the spammer except for the development time of the scripts themselves, and the established spammer can afford to throw as many servers as is required at the problem. All you will do is turn a proportion of the small LL owners to the dark side by revealing black hat tricks of which they would otherwise be ignorant. Small LL owners and free site builders just cannot compete with the sheer volume of stuff, the tools, the high level of optimization or the volume of linking power that either spammers or more accomplished white hat SEOs can bring to the table. I should add that I have heaps of respect for the Penisbot/ Dangerdave style white hats with real volume, and I think that is an awesome business model, just not one that interests me... but there is no room in the world of SEs for the miniroller if you want to make real money... IMHO. The advantage of the group reporting system is that the big dog white hats get the little yappers to do their shit work for them.

[Bill]

There is some truth to that, BUT...

1. There is no market force to stop scriptspammers from pushing the button and adding even more pages to google.

The one thing that is absolutely certain, is that if we don't counterattack spam, spam will continue to grow and take money from our pockets.

2. By definition, every scripted spam network of 125,000 pages we knock out will increase the number of dollars in our pockets.

3. Google's new patent with it's ageing implications, if it is active, may level the playing field a bit, as may other changes in search technology.

Scripted "junk" content is an information problem that will be solved sooner or later.

4. It might warm the cockles of our hearts to be the ones putting the shaft to the spammers, as opposed to the alternative.

---

As far as I'm concerned, the primary issue here is the question of wether or not the spamreport can actually be effective.

It obviously _should_ be done, the question is _can_ it be done...

[RawAlex]

Bill, in theory, you are right, in reality, you are wrong.

The average SE spammer is working 1 cycle ahead. They are assuming that whatever is up this month is going to be toast in the next update, so they are already working on the next batch. Figure probably 10 real cycles per year, so they have 10 projects per year.

So we can bitch and moan and whine and get google to remove their domains at the end of a cycle - only to have it all replaced with another pile of spamming dung.

They are laughing at you because instead of improving your own stuff, you have been killing off what they were already assumign would be dead. That is the beauty for them to what they do - they only things exposed are at the end's of their lives anyway.

Google works as a reactive system to spam. You report spam, they look at it, they develop new tools for their algo, and they hope to kill the spam the next time around without deleting half the web on the way by.

They are 100% reactive, and 100% committed to removing spam through careful (and often convoluted) programming methods.

It's a totally bullshit way to get rid of spam.

Considering the value of Google these days, they can afford to hire a small group (20 - 40 people) to spend their days looking at the sites in the top 20 of the top 1000 searches, plus whatever domains have marked increases in pages in a given update cycle. If a domain goes from 200 pages to 125,000 pages in a month, well, it shoudl be flagged for review BY A HUMAN.

Then they need to make it so said domain can be banned and removed INSTANTLY (or as instantly as possible) rather than having it slowly fade out over a 30-60 day period.

Google really blows at this point, and it's getting worse instead of better.

Alex

[Bill]

Ahhh, Alex, so then you are saying that the google spamreport doesn't work?

At a minimum, you appear to be saying it doesn't work well enough to be bothered with.

[Bill]

You said...
----
They are laughing at you because instead of improving your own stuff, you have been killing off what they were already assumign would be dead.
----

Alex, first of all, it's not possible for the average webmaster to "improve" their own stuff to a level where it effectively compete with a comitted spammer. But that's another issue.

If it can't be done by spending a few hours per month, if it takes more time than that, I agree, it wouldn't work.

But, it's possible that the return on investment for two hours a month of spam reporting could be significant. We don't have to stop spam completly, but like with any parasite, it could be healthy to knock it back every once in a while.

I share your general annoyance at google. I have yet to actually, personally SEE the google spamreport work.

I think it's an experiment that should be tried.

[doublep]

Alex - I know for a fact you are not a racist As for the subject of search engine spammers/cheaters - I care not what colour, race, or creed they are - whether they prefer Pepsi to Coke, I don't care about their motives either - a cheater is a cheater is a cheater. There are American cheaters/spammers using Chinese servers to cheat, there are Russian cheaters using Brazilian servers to cheat, there are Eastern Europeans using Canadian servers to cheat - some think these cheat - these guys think these guys cheat. Cheaters can be broken down further too - Surfers cheat, webmasters cheat, sponsors cheat, corporations cheat... and on and on it goes!

Like yourself, I'm a link list owner, I have enough on my plate keeping cheaters at bay on my own little corner of the web. Unfortunately greed is prevalent in all races - the point I was making is that not all members of any particular race are cheaters - most have morals and integrity - and lumping the tendency for greed and deception on any group just because they are outside of ones country is wrong - hence, I did get a little wound up by Gideon's post when I read parasite and foreigner in the same line.

To be honest - I'm past caring who is spamming Google with this and that new technique - let Google worry about it - it's their traffic after all - not mine or any other webmasters - cheaters will always be here - as you say ".. we can bitch and moan and whine and get google to remove their domains at the end of a cycle - only to have it all replaced with another pile of spamming dung". And also, as you rightly say, the only way you can compete with them is improving your own stuff! That I do believe to be true.

[Linkster]

Alex - actually Google has hired rooms full of people -they are online as of a few months ago doing "quality hand checks" - part of a university project they have going on

As far as the spam report - yeah it works - may not seem that way in some cases - but those are the ones that Google tries to fight over a long period of time.

More important though - most of this building ahead and knowing your stuff is toast a wekk after it appears is very correct - and accounted for - so for the ones that want to take the few minutes to fill out the report - thats fine - if not - thats fine too

[Robert]

2 domains mentioned in this thread are history ...

[Linkster]

Robert - havent seen ya in a long time - hows things since that smashingthumbs demise?

[gideon]

Guys don't listen to spammers who try and convince you that its not worth reporting spam. It works almost everytime. The key is to fill out the spam report and on the "Additional details:" area put the root domain in there. This works for me every single time. And its not AFTER a cycle. I have seen them gone as fast as 6 days. I target 13 keyword phrases for a site of mine and I am back in the top 10 on almost all of them using the spam report.

I been at it 8 months and counting and the spammers are not back every cycle. Rorschach is full of shit.

Fighting spam is not futile, its an awesome way to get back traffic we normal webmasters work for.

[Robert]

Hey Linkster,
you know, I dont post much on boards, even though I read them almost daily.

Everything works great for me ... thanks for asking I have couple of new projects that enjoy all the love they get from Google. I've celebrated 1st anniversary of smashingthumbs ban 2 weeks ago , Privatecuties.com is growing up nicely and I still learn from your and Bills posts here ... however I spend most of my time on my non-adult stuff.

Also, glad to see linkforsex recovered from that google mid Dec screw up

[doublep]

Originally Posted by Robert

2 domains mentioned in this thread are history ...

Which two?

[tickler]

Originally Posted by gideon

Guys don't listen to spammers who try and convince you that its not worth reporting spam. It works almost everytime. The key is to fill out the spam report and on the "Additional details:" area put the root domain in there. This works for me every single time. And its not AFTER a cycle. I have seen them gone as fast as 6 days.

Generally I see their listing(s) disappear after about 3 business days when I report them.

Seriously thinking about doing a small script to monitor a list of keywords, and report anything spammy above that shows up above me in the listings.

Wonder how good their "business plan" will work, if they only get a few days of traffic before getting tossed, if a few thousand WMs start doing the same thing with their Keywords.

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by Altheon

I'm going over it now and it looks like this guys is doing some sort of cloaking. I'm using CodeLifter to grab his page. Sadly it can't pick up the stuff that his server does.

just hit google for site:www.songlyrics4me.com for more details


pornrex,

This is the code I lifted from a page of SE spammer. Hopefully we can put our heads together and figure out how he/she did it.

-A

I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this before, but there are a bunch of links to porn related urls on the bottom of the source code hidden crudely by the <div style='display: none;'> tag.

[Halfdeck]

His Silvercash acc # is 1007351, and nasty dollars acc id is easymojo, in case anyone is interested.

[Bill]

That's the spirit! I'm glad to see there is an interest in this...

I wonder what would happen if the sponsors in question started receiving concentrated complaints about spammer ID's, complaints combined with postings on message boards listing known spammer IDs and the sponsors who are protecting them?

Like Gideon says, and as people like Linkster and DD say, they key to getting the spamreport to work involves putting as much extra information about the whole network as possible into the spam report form.

Don't report individual pages, report whole networks at once.

It may take some help from people with whois.sc accounts to get the best effect from this.

---

I think maybe the next step would be to identify a few new spam networks, post their domain names and some sample pages here, then see if we can get a half dozen to a dozen people here to counter attack them all at once.

The counter attack would involve:

1. A group effort with the spamreport page.

and, for additional effect...

2. A group effort writing spam complaints to the sponsors about the sponsor ID's involved, inviting the sponsors to come here and explain why they support search engine spam.

(this second part may or may not work, but if it works even a little bit, imagine how satisfying that would be. )

[doublep]

Go on then, count me in - I'll help out anyway I can.

[doublep]

.. and Gideon - I checked your blog, it's right up my street

I loved this:

TVNL Editor's Comments: This morning Miles O'Brien, the pretend journalist on CNN, asked a shark expert what he thought “the shark was thinking” while it was biting the girl who was killed in Florida. Am I wrong or can we simply declare that the talking heads on CNN are idiots? What kind of question is that? He also asked the expert what makes this attack different than other attacks. I’ll answer that…the overblown and idiotic media coverage.

Cheers - I'm going to send you an icq request

[Rorschach]

So can someone tell me why you don't think that sponsors should not accept perfectly legal traffic? For example, with the filehandler.biz guy's stuff - no laws are being broken, no mainstream surfers are being forced to look at porn, there's no blog/ wiki/ ref spamming, about the only thing he's guilty of is adding some hidden links to the bottom of the pages on his own site and using a content delivery method that the SEs themselves use. The guy isn't filling up the internet with hardcore free porn for minors to look at (except for the single hosted galleries to which he sends some of his traffic). In my view this is certainly no worse than expired domain traffic (with which a far greater proportion of mainstream surfers get sucked into looking at porn) and no one ever bitches about that.

Oh sorry, I forgot, he's "cheating honest webmasters."

SPAM = Site Positioned Above Mine

[Bill]

An old argument.

And the truth is many sponsors don't care a bit.

Many sponsors will just ignore such complaints.

But, it would be interesting to see what happens.

If just a few big sponsors decide that their long term interests are better served by avoiding se spam traffic, at least we would know those companies were a good choice for long term support.

I mention the sponsor thing only because any counterattack to spam would work best if you attacked on several fronts at once - and sponsors are one of the weak points that could be attacked.

I agree it is a weak tactic.

But some se spammers steal copy, so if we find stolen copy on a spam page, well, suddenly we have a stronger hand against the sponsor who is profiting from stolen copyrighted material.

[RawAlex]

Originally Posted by gideon

Guys don't listen to spammers who try and convince you that its not worth reporting spam. It works almost everytime. The key is to fill out the spam report and on the "Additional details:" area put the root domain in there. This works for me every single time. And its not AFTER a cycle. I have seen them gone as fast as 6 days. I target 13 keyword phrases for a site of mine and I am back in the top 10 on almost all of them using the spam report.

I been at it 8 months and counting and the spammers are not back every cycle. Rorschach is full of shit.

Fighting spam is not futile, its an awesome way to get back traffic we normal webmasters work for.

This would be to suggest I am a spammer?

Nice.

Alex

[gideon]

Alex - that was directed at Rorshach. Go easy man .. this should be about working together against search engine spam and results hijacking. Don't say that I called you anything because I didn't but I did leave the door open for guilt by association so if the shoe fits..

I personally don't think you are a spammer but far be it from me to make that assesment. Feel free to let me know otherwise.

Peace,
- Gideon

[Halfdeck]

Count me in Bill. It takes no time to send off a quick email or fill out a spam report. Considering the death of even a few spam networks may mean more money in our pockets, why not?