Will Amazon Affiliate Twitter posting tool increase spam?
Amazon has introduced a new feature for its Affiliate members, making it easy to post a link to any product on the site to Twitter.
It’s another step in making it easy to promote Amazon’s products, after the introduction of cut-and-paste widgets and “link to this page” for bloggers and website owners.
Yet Twitter is already flooded with spam and promotional messages, and Amazon has just made it a whole lot easier for casual spammers to flood the service with affiliate links.
Additionally, because the links are effectively cloaked (a side effect of having a limited character count on Twitter) it’s not easy to know what will directly benefit the Twitter account holder if the link is clicked and a purchase is made.
Of course, seasoned spammers will already have automated systems in place to create and publish tweets, but now anyone can do it with just a few clicks.
I don’t deny that the service is useful. If you have a loyal Twitter following and are genuinely recommending products, and providing disclosure, then the occasional link is fine. This new tool will save you time.
Unfortunately, I can also see it adding to the stream of rubbish flowing through Twitter, and an increase in the number of account blocks I’ll be having to do on a regular basis.
What do you think?
Are You Being Attacked By Spam?
Back in July, I informed you what I believe to be the best comment/Akismet configuration in WordPress. This is the configuration I use on my own WordPress powered blog but for the past two nights I’ve checked my email after work, I’ve noticed that my blog had been slammed by spam bots. I’m used to seeing something being advertised in these comments but this time, these comments appear to be garbage text. Check out the screenshot to see what I mean.
Typically, with my configuration, I’ll see 4 or 5 spam comments in my moderation queue as most of the other spam comments are made on posts older than three months. With these however, all of the posts which have been spammed have been within that three month time span and the content of the comments have no rhyme or reason. Seems like a giant waste of time and or money.
Anyone else experiencing this type of behaviour?
Backlinks Or Spam?
The fine folks over at CatsWhoCode.com have put together a list of around 250 different blogs who have DoFollow links as well as blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin and the Top Commentators widget. The purpose of their article was to compile this list for those out their who are looking to gain backlinks.
I must give these guys credit. They did mention within their article about spamming blogs using their lists.
So, if you want to create a real visibility for your blog and not being called a spammer, always leave relevant comments when you have something to say.
Please do not use this list for spamming.
I use DoFollow on my own personal blog as well as CommentLuv as a means of rewarding individuals who contribute to the conversations that take place on the blog. I will admit, it seems like these two avenues have opened up even more flood gates in terms of the amount of spam comments I receive. Worst yet, the list of DoFollow blogs were compiled using software called Fast Blog Finder. So not only do I as a blog owner have to deal with automated spam, I now have to deal with human beings looking for backlinks through means of leaving comments.
You know, if you want to generate backlinks, do it the old fashioned way. Create a kick ass article. Create something that is link bait. It may not be as easy as commenting on a bunch of blogs but at least you’ll decrease the risk of your future comments being flagged as spam automatically from services such as Akismet. If you’re not sure on how to create link bait, check out the following articles from Performancing.
How To Create User Generated Linkbait And Build Relationships At The Same Time
The Five Components Of A Great Linkbait
Stop Spamming My Blog
I’m all about the link love. I don’t mind adding relevant links to my blogroll and I like to offer a week ending link love post on most of my blogs. That’s why it really annoys me when visitors comment just to spam. I’m not talking about the bots, I’m talking about regular visitors to my blog. Most commenters are smart. They can figure out there’s a space on most comment forms for which to leave links. Some don’t get it or don’t care.
I’m pretty easy. I don’t mind if something on your blog will add to the discussion on my blog. In which case you can state your point of view in the comments and afterwards invite people to check the link. When your only comment is a link to your blog, it’s not going to make it past the moderation filter.
Recently one of my regulars left this comment on more than one occasion:
“This site is entirely too serious. You need to come to (blog name here) for a good laugh.” How is that contributing to the conversation? Another one of my regulars only comments unless she can plug one of her own blog posts or articles. “You have a point Deb, but as I wrote the other day in my article entitled…” To me this is akin to my going to someone’s party and telling the guests, “This party sucks. Come to my house for a better time.” It’s rude.
Anyone who knows me knows I got to this point because of shameless self promotion. I never spammed a blog or forum with links though. I might drop a link now and then on a forum if it’s relevant to a conversation or I’m invited to do so, but otherwise, no spam. It would never occur to me to visit another blog and only leave a link to my blog, either.
If you want people to visit your blog, there are several ways to get their attention:
• Leave an intelligent, relevant comment on another blog and drop your link only in the designated space.
• Participate in forums in your niche and leave a link in the signature line.
• Offer to guest post for another blog.
• Write good, useful content and others will take notice.
Right now, my comments are set up so a new visitor’s first comment or any comments with a link in the body are sent to the moderation filter. I’m amazed by how many of the same people try and spam my blog over and over again rather than creating a buzz with a good comment.
If you know me, you know I don’t mind giving out the link love. Just don’t spam my blog.
MyBlogLog getting Spammed? No Shit Sherlock…
Why it surprises Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny that an exploit in newly acquired MyBlogLog is already being exploited by marketers and seo’s is beyond me. The fact that Andy Beal and quite a number of other folks are using MBL to spam blogging communities is just the inevitable consequence of the service going mainstream. Opportunities are exploited, fact of life.
Jeremy, hitting Andy’s reputation will sort him out for sure, but you can’t do it to everyone — time to start plugging holes in the MBL system wouldn’t you say?
How Plone Websites are being Used to Spam Blogs
There’s an interesting, destructive little exploit being used to spam Performancing.com and doubless many other blogs at the moment. It took a small amount of investigation but was fairly easy to work out, and rather than sit on the info and hope it will go away, I’ll show you how it’s done, so that Plone might work to fix this problem. At least they could alert their users to the risks.
How it Works
1. Find sites built with Plone.
2. Join those sites, and create a page like this one. Notice that it redirects to Performancing.com?
You can make it do that by putting code like this in the body:
Why It Works
What happens is, Google follows the link from your spam on sites like this one but does not redirect as Googlebot doesn’t follow Javascript redirects. As you’ve chosen Plone sites with good reputation and PageRank, they rank for the terms you use in your link text, and unsuspecting Google users click the linksthey find in Search results, and are redirected to your scummy pharma affiliate link.
No need for a real website of your own, this is Parasite SEO kids.
Ordinarily I’d not waste time with it, but if it starts affecting my sites, i get kind of interested in seeing it stop you know?
powered by performancing firefox
Fark Killed My Blog
Yesterday my photography blog got “farked“. This ought to have been a day for celebrating but in actual fact the first I knew about it was when someone emailed to say my site was down.
It turns out my web host has a policy where they disable a site that uses more than 20% of processor. It seems that my (pretty much default other than template) Drupal install was gobbling up resources. According to Metrics I received an additional ~8000 visitors before my blog died (or was killed, either or).
Lessons learned
- Use traffic management settings before things like this happen – in Drupal that means switch caching and throttling on and be careful what frivolous modules you have running
- Check your blog every day at least, don’t wait for a visitor to tell you that your blog is down
- You get what you pay for where hosting companies are concerned
- Read the terms and conditions before signing up
- Take regular backups of all important files and databases
- Host critical domains outside of your hosting agreement (if things get nasty you don’t want your domain held to ransom)
- It might be a hobby blog to you but people miss your stuff when it isn’t there
Luckily my photography blog is a labour of love rather than something I rely on for income. Just imagine if it was critical and I had been away on business or vacation, I might have been looking at a hole in my bank balance a week from now.
The thing that will be most interest to you guys that have been following the social bookmarking threads is out of those ~8000 additional visitors I gained one new user, 10 additional adsense clicks and zero RSS subscribers.
Just goes to show, I would much rather receive steady traffic than a flood!
Added: A couple of Metrics charts to see a little better what happened. Notice the cut-off of traffic when my blog was pulled!
Added: 23rd August, the party is over. Fun while it lasted!
Typepad Introduce New Anti Spam Tool
Not long ago I posted about a hack that allowed TypePad users to ban specific words in comments or trackbacks by entering them in the field for banning IP addresses. I cautioned against using it at the time because it had an unresolved issue— the words were not specific enough. Banning the word “the” would also ban “theater,” “theremin,” and so on. But that just changed.
TypePad has updated their spam protection settings to make this a real feature with an improved interface allowing words to be banned safely. Now, I’m not one to ban profanity for example… and there are a lot of words that show up in spam that also have legitimate uses (like MP3 for example). But there’s a much more powerful, hidden side to this new word banning feature. It allows you to ban URLs!
If I can ban specific URLS, I can prevent the vast bulk of spam from ever reaching my blog. This has me pretty excited. Banning IP addresses doesn’t do much to stop the spread of spam… IP addresses can be generated on the fly. I’ve often had dozens of spam comments or trackbacks from the same website that use different names, IPs and contents. The one thing they all share in common is the URL. So, while I wouldn’t suggest banning the word “online,” banning “www.spaces.msn.com/onlinecasinosgambling” is a winner.
I’ve actually been saving a few spam trackbacks all week while I waited for this to go live, just so I could have the pleasure of banning them officially. Heh. It’s too soon to say for sure, but I really think this will be a much more effective way to block spam than CAPTCHAs or IP banning. In fact, I’m going to remove the CAPTCHA requirement from my comments now that this has launched. I hate having to fill them in myself in order to reply to comments.
Here’s a screen grab (click to enlarge) of the new Word and IP Banning feature, accessible at Control Panel > Site Access > Word and IP Banning. The description;
Adding a word to the ban list will block any comments or TrackBacks which contain that word. Word banning will ban instances of the word regardless of whether it contains upper or lower case characters.
does not mention URLs specifically, but as you can see, topping my list is the casino spammer that last hit my blog this week. And so long as you ban the URL as one word, you won’t be banning parts of it such as www.
Congrats to the Design Team for this one! I think it’s gonna make a big difference in keeping comments and trackbacks clean of spam.
