Spamouflage: The method or result of concealing or disguising search engine spam to make it appear to be legitimate. Derived from spam + camouflage.
An example of Spamouflage:
Marco of pivot blacklist sent me an e-mail today about a blog spamming issue.
As a departure from conventional comment spamming, some SEO Black Hats have begun including links to non spam sites in their comment spam bots.
Someone (or more than one) is currently spamming with links to my site. At first I thought this might be some malicious SEO blackhat who hates me for writing rather effective anti blogspam software but later on I found out this isn’t the case. The fact that my site is affected seems to be a matter of bad luck and unrelated to my activities in the field of blogspam prevention. Several other bloggers who have nothing to do with spam on both the sending and the receiving end have been affected by it.
An article about it has been posted on spamhuntress.com
My question to you is:
Do you have any idea why this new kind of spam is happening?
Is this an attempt to disturb the already highly ineffective centralized blacklists? (they don’t work at all since spam domains tend to be created faster than anyone can maintain such a list).
While I do think that degrading the effectiveness of a blacklist may be the goal of some search engine spammers, our more important focus is the search engines.
Often, we comment spam on blogs that have been abandoned. When a blog is abandoned, the comment sections frequently has 10-20 links to pharmacies, adult sites, poker . . . etc.
Dropping in a few links to legitimate site is like planting pretty flowers in a “bad neighborhood.” I don’t want my backlinks nestled between 8 links to other spam sites. On a linear model, I would prefer my back-links to be between two trusted authorities - sites with impeccable reputations. It would be even better if these sites added contextual relevance, but that’s not as necessary.
We don’t know exactly how Google or Yahoo’s algorithms read. We can only make informed guesses about what they are and where we think they are going.
If I were Google, and I saw a site’s URL listed with 8 other known spam sites, the temptation would be to count that as a mark against the site.
This tactic, a form of Spamouflage, preempts the effectiveness of such a countermeasure; it’s like thinking several moves ahead in chess and makes it more difficult to categorize a URL as spam.
While there are clearly benefits to adding spamouflage to comment spamming, it’s always possible that someone just thought it would be funny to comment spam links to an anti-spam-site . Any serious search engine spammer could do much more to get your site penalized or sandboxed than link dumping in blog comment fields.
3 Responses to “Spamouflage”
Well I don’t think spamouflage is for hurting other sites. From my personal experience I can say that adding links to authority sites gives you a small boost in the serp’s (I guess many of you know this) - and this is what they may be trying to do.
[…] Think for yourself. Read this post. Think about it. Now read this one. Now you go and read this blog for 6 months and then come back. You may be a couple of steps closer to becoming a successful Black Hat SEO. […]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Interesting analysis. Thanks for adding it to your blog! It makes a bit more sense to me now I guess. It became pretty clear to me that centralized blacklists are becoming a dead end pretty soon. I never liked them anyway because they tend to falsely block comments if wrongly configured and at the same time they let a significant proportion of linkspam pass through.
As for the last paragraph: I don’t think there’s much benefit in getting a blogger (me, or anyone else) ‘penalized’ by google. Most bloggers don’t have such high pageranks anyway and more important: most bloggers don’t even care for pagerank because we tend to publish on many different subjects anyway which aren’t closely related like material on for example a baby clothing merchant website. A blogger gets most of his traffic from other blogs linking to him and from tag index sites such as Technorati. Visitors arriving through Google are of very little importance because they tend to arrive randomly and land on your blog mostly by accident while looking for something. Because of this I don’t think search engine optimization really matters all that much to bloggers. Link-count on Technorati or similar sites is much more important.