SE Spammer Revealed
 

For you guys at the SE chat here is the page of the spammer that Linkster mentioned.

-A

Hi Altheon.

Forgive my newbieness but what does this mean?

It's an ugly bugger. ;-}

Did the page have that "WELCOME" title, or did it somehow generate another title?

How does it work? It looks like it's just calling a bunch of frames. Presumably then there's another script generating the thousands of frames needed.

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 this is for SE spamming. From a first quick look it seems to me like this java script would generate a page with multi-frames (afaik multi-frames don't work best with SE's), then populate them with different content loading from different places (again, dynamic content, bad for the SE's). It also generates popups (bad for Se's as well?) and, again, puts dynamic pages in them, pages taken from here:

var s=new Array('','http://s3.filehandler.biz/fpa/bisexual/1.html','http://www.downloadpass.com/ft=pimp6434-1/view_n.htmlQQniche_id=255',
'http://s3.filehandler.biz/fpa/bisexual/dating.html',
'http://www.megasitepass.com/ft=pimp6434/index.html?cf=1','http://www.allsitesaccess.com/2/main.htm?id=easymojo&p=clean');

So, basically, different html pages from different sites ar being loaded as frames on his own pages. Also looks like the script is loading on the surfer's machine, and not on the server, which again can't be too good for SE bots...

At this point this don't seem like much of a SE spamming script that will actually work. Although it's early a.m. here and my half-shut eyes might have missed something, it's likely they didn't. This script just doesn't look like a wise SE spamming one. Has its purposes, yes, but hardly that purpose.

Ergo I doubt this is the script you guys were looking for - tho it's likely to be the same guy - the scripting is rather elegant then noobish ("not too too, not very very") so the guy who coded it might as well have coded some SE spamming stuff. Anyways, I'm positive Linkster was probably talking about something else. Waiting for his input on this one.

Altheon, if you get me this allegedly SE spammer's sites/domains, I'll have a sniff around... see what's up with the whole SE spamming thingie.

oh this is definitely the guy - he's dumped over 670000 pages into Google and is ranking in the top 10 for almost every term phrase he went after - he's populating the pages with search phrases he scraped from either Google or Yahoo - interesting approach - he built the first part of the site using non-adult stuff - song lyrics - then ran the script on adult terms with every page acting as a backlink

Of course I see Pimproll is getting some benefit from this guy - guess we'll have to do some more digging

I was trying to find a cached page for one of these to see what Google was seeing - fortunately it looks like theyve already started pulling his pages as theyve pulled all the caches and a lot of pages are going to url only - on his old pages he had some downloaders that would install a cab file and extract itself to load referral codes and nasties into cookies - pretty elaborate scheme

Maximum respect to the filehandler.biz guy... you rock! I am not sure if it is the same person as the old hornyalien spam (the original .biz spammer), but if it is, I have been watching your stuff for a long time and you have truly been an inspiration!

Well that domain isn't working anymore. Got a new one?

BTW, I don't think the sponsor has anything to mind about, does he?

try this one - its one of his others :)

tonsoflyrics com - BTW - all of his pages do have a downloader built in so be careful

hmmm... he was blocking ip's that's why I got an error. Hey, linkster, are you ever on ICQ?

The crappy thing is that alot of sponsors allow this shit and thats why its such a problem. I have reported alot of these bastards to Pimproll and others and they really are asswhipes about it.

On the other hand Google and other search engines actually do something about it. I have screwed a bunch of the bastards even the pathetic loser who posts in every thread on Greenguy and Jim about SE spamming.. whats his name? oh yeah "poser wannabe" I mean Rorschach ... this guy is a bane on all webmasters who play by the rules. Pathetic parasites... he is as usual a foreigner..

Rorschach - I forgot about you for awhile but don't worry you just reminded me to go do some Google policing :) Thanks BUDDY! |thumb

Was meaning to ask myself about the tonsoflyrics.com guy, seen a lot of his pages in the last 2 days. Here's hoping he gets hit by a big truck.

You haters never fail to amuse... come back and talk to me once you can do at least 100 sign ups in a day... amateur! |waves|

JohnnyR, google has improved it's spidering of frames, so the old limitations with frames don't apply so much anymore.

Similarly for dynamic content. Some dynamic content still baffles the spider, but a lot of it is a lot more spiderable than it was some months ago.

Since I am a recent convert to the efficacy of the google spam report page, PROVIDED that the right techniques are used for reporting spam, I think it might be worthwhile for us to study pages like these and learn how to attack them as a group.

There's a whole business model that can be built around reporting and helping to remove spam like this.

But, it will take a bit of strategy, getting the right information, and using the right methods.

Actually generating pages like that isn't all that hard. Combinations of PHP, htaccess, and a small database, and you can generate pages like a wild man. Googlebot is a little bit stupid when it comes to these things, and can often be tricked into pikcing up tens of thousands of pages very quickly.

The code you are seeing is secondary code, IMHO - it is what he is doing to some of the traffic when he gets the hit from google. You would have to immitate googlebot (spoof headers, whatever) to really see what the bots see.

He is doing too good of a job. Greedy moron!

Hey dickhead! - In case it as escaped your attention - there are lot of foreigners who contribute/read this board - why not keep your racist comments to yourself!

Secondly - do you really think any sponsor who has webmasters - whatever race - sending thousands of dollars in sales per day to their program by means that you don't agree with actually give a fuck what you think! If you do - you have truly just dropped out the mother ship - Tsk!

You are either a pathetic spammer yourself or you are just plain ignorant. Foreigner (if you have been around the game as long as I have) almost always refers to the guys from those countries which are usually banned by sponsors anyway because of the CHEATING and other illegal activities. Now futhermore I stated a FACT you little piss ant. Why can I not tell the truth? If it makes you mad then tell all your little buddies to quit fucking up the fucking internet for everyone else! I have been around since the beginning and the "foreigners" have ALWAYS fucked it up. From hiring a bunch of fuckers to sit at terminals in a warehouse clicking links to make per click programs go away and then later on in the late '90s they started using stolen credit cards which fucked up the scrubbing for honest webmasters and made ratios go to shit and lets not forget about all the fucking tricks and viruses that they fuck our surfers with so that the surfers aren't as comfortable surfer porn sites anymore. AND the god damn email spamming thats has fucked up what could have been a great additional way to make money. AND of course the SEARCH ENGINE SPAM you want to pretend is OK for your little buddies to do. Fuck you and your little roaches. I am tired of everyone being scared to admit the truth. I just did.

NOW if this does not apply to you then keep your mouth shut if it does then you should rot in hell with the rest of the foreign spammers

Not one time have I ever made a racist comment. I told the truth. Racism can be defined at dictionary.com since the meaning of the word seems to have eluded you.

gideon, I hardly doubt doublep is a spammer as you're suggesting. I mean, check his sig. I'm sure you know his LL, he probably sent you lots of good traffic along the way, as he did for me. Further more, I belive there's no nead for this war between us... We all agree, these guys have to be stopped. So why not put our energy at doing something to stop them, instead of fighting amongst each other. Some harsh words might have been said, but that's not such a big deal. Let's leave these kind of comments aside, and focus on the job at hand.

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

My apologies..

Hehehh.. that cracked me up, thanks. :)

Gideon - you missed my point - cheaters come from every corner of this planet - yes, even the good old U S of A - as an American, your attention should be focused on your own elected cheaters, who are slowly but surely cheating you out of your right to conduct business. There are lots of nice folk on this board , who are foreigners - - and are most defiantly not cheaters. Food for thought!
It is Friday night - I have an appointment with a Mr Daniels - one of my favorite Americans! ;-)

Johnny R - Greetings! :-)

Peace - PP

Greetings doublep. Glad you guys sort this out.

I have a question about it: why does this guy have the lyrics paravan? I don't get it. Is he tricking the SEs in some way with it? They crawl the first few pages, give his domain the "ok" and only then they get into the porn stuff which they think it's ok too? I mean, it's a porn site, even if it doesn't have the right domain name. So, why the front? Why not have porn on the main page to act like a hub or something?

Doublep, I am not in the slight bit racists or otherwise having prejudice to people (my girlfriend is from a completely different culture, as are many of the friends).

However, if I want to locate an SE spammer or a link list cheater, I can assure you 110% that I have way more chance to find one if I head just slightly east of your location.

Some of the best programmers in the world, combined with a "fuck the system" attitude and a willingness to do almost anything for money makes certain eastern block countries heaven for spammers, scammers, and jammers.

It's not racist, it's what almost 10 years in this business has taught me.

Alex

doubleep - That is something we both agree on! I have a blog http://jasop.blogspot.com where I vent and rant about these insane people who have hijacked my country. This is a scary time and I apologize for being so close minded.. and a bit prejudiced in my statements.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

2 domains mentioned in this thread are history ...

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

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.

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 |waves|

Which two?

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.