But whats the advantage for them spamming a forum like ours. Its not as if they are going to get a lot out of it.
Ahhh, but they do. They get dollars, they get pounds, they get euros, they get yen, etc.
Let's say you just created a new whig-jig, to grind smoke with. What's the fastest way to tell people about your whig-jig? Newspaper? Local radio? Local TV? Noooo, you've developed an amazing whig-jig and people all over the world will want to buy a dozen, as soon as they see how efficiently the grind smoke. So you decide to build a Web site to advertise and sell whig-jigs.
But, wait. You've just registered gerryswhigjigs.com, paid a Web developer a pile of cash to develop you a really gorgeous Web site and you don't have a lick of traffic. Because no one knows you are there.
So, you hire link builders to build backlinks into your site. These link builders (a.k.a. spammers) register on Web sites, post a couple of topics about how great Gerry's Whig-jigs are, report the URLs where they've dropped the links and then they move on. If the links stay alive on the sites where they've been dropped for a couple weeks time, the link builder gets paid for them. So they do get a lot out of it, you see?
The links do two things (at least on some sites). People see the posts about how great your whig-jigs are and so they visit your site and buy a couple dozen for their family and friends. But, more importantly, the search engine spiders crawl the sites where your links have been dropped, they follow the links by jumping off the site they were crawling to visit your site. And every forum admin and webmaster in the world wants those spiders crawling their sites. Because the spiders pick up keywords on the pages of a site and when someone searches for those keywords, your site has a possibility of popping up. The more links leading to you, the 'weight' the search engines grant your site. And the more 'weight' your site has, the better the chances of it appearing near the top of a search. The closer to the top of a search page it appears, the more chances people will click on it. The more people clicking on your link means more visitors to your site. The more visitors you get, the better the chance you will sell more of your whig-jigs.
I just looked and Google is reporting a tick over 206,000 links coming into this site, 134,091 to the forum index page and 72,191 coming into the portal page. I wish that number was 806,000. And you want to know where the lion's share of those backlinks are coming from? Take a look down there at my signature. See those two links, one for The Loyal Men and one for The Children of Scotland? The Loyal Men is a USA chapter forum of a Scottish Jacobite group, called
Na Fir Dileas, which is Gaelic for The Loyal Men. The other is my Clann Alba forum,
clann alba being Gaelic for the children of Scotland. Every forum I belong to (and that number is well over 150, these days) where I will not get the boot for using those links, I have them inserted in my signature file. I've built over 27,300 backlinks into the
Na Fir Dileas site and over 136,000 backlinks into
Clann Alba, just by posting on other sites.
Some sites won't direct search engine traffic to me, via my backlinks, but the backlinks are still counted. And people might see the backlinks and come check out my sites. And people visiting my sites is what I want. If the search engines follow my backlinks, so much the better, but it's the people I want.
Which is what you also want, so you can sell whig-jigs.
So, you see, a spammy link can attract search engine spiders and bots in some instances and it can attract human traffic in other instances. And either way, the spammer gets paid to drop the links where both you and the search engines can find them.
We had a recent spam at work,from someone called Lorain... about 20 a day. Got hold of our guys who host the site and they said
Oh OK you got that. We have a fix which we will put on your server.
The mails stopped within the hour.
Spam e-mails are something entirely different. They are directed to just people, the people who receive them. Maybe you're not interested in the new water vapor cigarettes, but if I send a bajillion e-mails about them, I might be able to get some people to buy them.
I run a spam detection script on my e-mail servers that uses some pretty sophisticated techniques to sort out spam messages and delete them without my ever having to deal with them. Even with it running, I have a couple of domains that have around 60 self-created filters added to the system, to help it 'learn' what to block and what not to block. Send me a perfectly legitimate e-mail with something like the water vapor cigarettes or work at home jobs or ceramic kitchen knives in the subject field and I can guarantee you I will never see the e-mail. It will get rubbed out at the server level, before it ever hits my Inbox.
The question Im asking is what do they gain if modern software can kick them in to touch in the blink of an eye.
Sorry Mike Im just curious.
Remember above, where I mentioned belonging to over 150 different forums? The majority of those sites are related to Web site operation in general or forum administration in particular. I am always watching for what the new spam trends are, as well as the techniques to prevent it from happening to my sites or my customers' sites. If I can stay ahead of the curve, I have the spammers beat before they catch onto the new tricks themselves. Some site admins don't have the same intensity. You've seen their sites, full of porn posts and football jersey ads. For me, it's not an option. I have to stay ahead, because I'll not have my sites defaced with a bunch of spammy links. And you know what? Staying ahead is not as easy as you might think. But I don't want my users to be interrupted or offended by porn ads, so I thrash to keep my safeguards current.
It's coming up on 12 hours since I sat down here this morning, so please excuse the mess that has accumulated over the course of the day.
The box on the left is the box I use for my job. Firefox is running on that box and I am checking some information on the Invision company forums. Thunderbird is also running, sweeping 9 different e-mail accounts every 10 minutes.
The box on the right is my current development box and is currently running Iceweasel, with 5 different tabs open, one of them being this particular post. Icedove is monitoring 8 different e-mail accounts, sweeping them every 10 minutes. Tweetdeck is also running, monitoring 19 columns, 6 of them my own accounts, the others being targeted search columns.
About 8-9 steps behind me is an iMac, running Firefox with either 3 or 4 tabs open on it. Thunderbird is sweeping 6 e-mail accounts, every 10 minutes.
The notebook computer is not turned on at present. I'm not sure why, but it's not.
If I finish up in time this evening, I'll be ordering a 5th computer yet tonight. I'm trying to re-engineer my desk to fit it in here. The CPUs are going to need to go under the desk somehow, because the new box will be even larger than the two already crammed in here. The new box will be a God-box. An i7-930 processor, 9 GB of RAM, dual 1.5 TB hard drives, dual optical drives and a 24" HD monitor. I thought about just moving the iMac in here, but I need more computing power than it can provide.
When you are online, you click to visit a site and you wait until the site is loaded up on your machine. When I click on another site, I move to another machine and use it, so I am not sitting here, waiting on a site to load into my browser. I don't have time to wait. Some people multi-task on their computers. I multi-task on multiple computers. I am trying to earn a living, I am trying to look after my customers' sites, I am trying to learn more about how to take care of those sites, I am trying to take care of my own sites and I am always trying to build more backlinks into my sites, which means posting to external sites.
And people ask me how my T-Bucket project is coming along? :rofl: Other than trips to the kitchen for coffee and a 35-40 minute lunch break, I've been thrashing right here at my desk for 12 hours. I'm meant to build a car at the same time? What about sleep? And the next couple days will be even more hectic, because I am taking Saturday afternoon and evening off to attend the NHRA Division 3 annual awards banquet. Brian won the divisional title and by golly, I am going to be there to see him awarded the fruits of his labors. Forums be damned, I'll not be here to monitor them. But there is still some work I need to get done before I can leave for a few hours. So tomorrow and Friday, I'll be running in hyperdrive. Because I don't want to just be above average. I want to be the best.
And part of the banning procedure allows me to report their information to the Invision Spam Services database, so they start getting blacklisted.
