The Dark Side of Content Marketing: Spamming is Really Easy.
I don’t know why this touched a nerve today, but when I received yet another comment spam notification, I kind of blew up. The trigger:
The Goal of Comment Spam
For years, companies have hired “website promotion firms” to try to get their site ranked higher in search engines, and one tactic is to get as many inbound links as possible. As part of their ranking algorithm, search engines look to see how many sites link to a certain page and count links as “votes”. This is a vast oversimplification, but you get the picture: the more sites that link to your page, the more valuable that page seems to search engines.
And that’s where comment spam comes in. Companies will use software, scripting, and other brute force methods to send what appear to be comments from human beings, hoping that a blog or site author will publish said comment, along with a link to the commenter’s site. And since it’s easy and free to do, why not send the same comment to millions of blogs, hoping that at least some of them will fall for the hoax and publish a link back to a page? Just like email spam, it’s a numbers game.
Content Spam as a Larger Spam Strategy
Because setting up a web site and publishing hundreds of pages of keyword-laden pages is simple (if you don’t care about quality of writing), people will focus on a market, and will create content spam as bait, in the hopes that they will rise through the search engine rankings. The process:
Step One: Find a market that requires local services. In this case, people that help you when you’re locked out (I’m not going to use the term in text here, as these spam companies have a history of DDOSing anyone criticizing them). When you’re locked out of your house, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to do a search for “title” + {whatever city you’re in}. This makes a perfect market for spammers.
Step Two: Build a cheap, basic website that can be repeated over and over. Since this is a numbers game, spammers focus on repeatability rather than quality. The example in question:
Look generic enough? Good. Because we’re going to be using this a LOT.
Step Three: Build a few pages that are lousy with keywords. Don’t worry about creating sentences that make sense. Focus on what people are searching for as they’re watching the dog chew up the couch from the back porch. They don’t care about spelling mistakes, they care about getting back inside!
Step Four: Build hundreds of these sites, all linking to one another. Just change “Boston” to any other city you can think of:
Step Five: Sell your services. Go through the yellow pages and call your target with an exclusive offer. Explain that you’re already bringing in x leads a month, and they’re begging for your business. We’ll make you the exclusive {job} in {city}, and you’ll already have a website. We’ll feature your phone number exclusively on a site that’s getting ###,### unique visitors per month.
Step Six: Repeat over and over.
Summary
Some will say that this way of doing business is simply taking advantage of the search engines, and is completely valid. Maybe.
But by spamming blogs and web sites using comment spam to lift these content farm sites to the top of search engine results, that’s not okay. That’s crossing the line. And a quick BBB check tells us that the company behind this spam empire is up to no good:
