Spammers

I've been meaning to talk about the movie For the Love of the Game. I will, however, put that off for at least a day. At this time I will talk about spammers. No doubt we can regonize these characters when they send us e-mail about Viagra or Hard Core Pics. Notably, perhaps as a direct result of being oversexed, they always misspell one thing or another.

I have a lot of experience with spammers. My main Yahoo! account after all, receives about 200 such mails per day. But there is another type of spammer: the guestbook spammer. How can you distinguish one? Do a Google search on link:http://cimplicity.net/. You'll notice that majority of the site's backlinks are from Guestbooks. Without doing this, however, I can already tell. I'm not such an innocent Netizen after all. There was a time when I wasn't such a nethical person. ;-) But enough about me.

So how is guestbook spamming done? How do you find guestbooks? How do you select which one to spam? It's simple actually. Let's use Dreambook as an example. Just do a Google search on site:dreambook.com. That step serves two purposes: you find lots of sites and you find the ones that are highly ranked.

Notice if you visit the sites on the first page of the search results that these are PR5 and PR4 sites. Read the entries. Mostly they'll butter up the webmaster with comments like, "nice site!" The point in commenting of course is to place their links. Visit http://books.dreambook.com/togores/guestbook.html and see exactly what I mean.

What I do with my guestbook is to aggressively edit out the URLs if I believe these are just spam entries. Moreover, I ban the IP addresses. I'm nasty aren't I?

More to come...