Why treat sploggers any differently?
When I handle comment or trackback spam that use trampolines, I routinely check for the sites the trampolines redirect or link to. Then I add those sites to the list of domains to be blacklisted on Google too. The whole reason the spammers use trampolines, is that they’ve “lost” a good number of domains to blacklisting of various forms, and don’t want to lose any more. By checking for the money sites, you’ll hurt them a little bit more.
But why should we treat sploggers any differently? If the goal is as Joe says to get PR for their money sites, then we should get those blacklisted too.
But slow down a little: Reporting the money sites isn’t as easy as counting all the links on a splog. I’ve seen few splogs, but those I’ve seen have mixed legitimate sites into the links. And I’ve seen affiliate links. So if you want to report the money sites, you need to know what you’re seeing before you start reporting.
November 5th, 2005 at 11:42 am
I afraid that in many cases webspamers are already aware of the fact of possible ban for redirect targets. Their workaround is creating a so called feed host that is either ppc feed or host that looks like a regular shop. In case of the second one this is not an actual beneficiary. Real beneficiary is either hided until you go to the basket or will never be visible in your address bar (usually this is simple api accessible from within php/perl/etc). In some cases beneficiary doesn’t care about ban at all, the more close beneficiary to something semi-legal, like many fields of medicine - the less it cares about ban…
And speaking about links you saw on splogs I should add that the third case (besides only money site’s links and legitimate/money mixture) is possible - only legitimate links. Of course that can be true only when js insertion in splog (or any other trampoline) is possible. I think they can do that for two reasons:
1) They are trying to fool alive antispamers.
2) They are trying to avoid automatic filters of SEs.
I’ve already seen some splogs on blogspot (the amount of such is so huge in msn’s serps…) contains nothing but regular links (seems like randomly taken from google serps, but that could also be yahoo, msn or just any other provides thematical links). And you should not forget that in many cases webspamers setup redirects only when got positioned, and that can happen far later than you had seen their webspam.
So in some cases the whole picture is very complicated. And I fully agree with you that any should be careful before starting to report splogs/trampolines spam beneficiaries when there are no redirects (yet).