The difference between webspam and mailspam websites
I was reading the excerpts of the papers due to be presented at The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam.
One of those papers is this one:
“Introducing the Webb Spam Corpus: Using Email Spam to Identify Web Spam Automatically”
According to what they’re saying about it on the excerpts page, I can tell you one thing: They’ve missed the mark entirely.
Why? Because the URL’s used in webspam do not point to typical mailspam webpages. They point to throwaways, designed to shield the end point website (which may in some cases resemble mailspam webpages) from getting zapped by search engines and hosting.
The throwaway sites do not resemble mailspam sites for a simple reason: They’re not there to snare attention from visitors, but to funnel the visitors on to the end point websites, without the search engines following along!
Think of it like this: For each website the webspammers are promoting, there are hundreds of throwaway sites that redirect users to the site, but it’s the throwaways that are ranking in search engines.
Which means looking at mailspammed websites from the point of view of analyzing webspam websites completely misses the mark.
We’re usually talking about a different set of spammers, with different payoffs.
Hey, if you want an analysis of the typical webspam website, ask me, eh?
June 5th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Great post!
i.love.spam@web.de
Keep on writing´this kind of stuff,
CU