Spam types
From Spamhuntress
Contents |
Blog Spam
Blog spam (or comment spam) is when spammers posting their links in comments to blogs. Because blogs are popular and well interlinked they often have good PageRank which the spammers try to take advantage of. This form of spam has been around for many years as Guestbook spam, but became a major problem as blogs became extrememly popular.
ISP's and Webhosts should update their AUP/TOS to include language that makes comment spam and any other webspam reason for termination. And if you do, add yourself to the Spam unfriendly page
Check Wikipedia's Spam in blogs for more background
Comment Spam
See Blog Spam.
Email Spam
Spamming began with email. It involves sending many thousands of emails using a list of emails and an automated spamming program. Sometimes spyware is sent with the spam, and sometimes a virus or trojan is used to send the spam itself from unwary computer owners who have been infected. Addresses can be harvested from webpages, forums, chat rooms, etc.
Forum Spam
Another form similar to blog and guestbook spam. These days it's quite common. Today's spambots can register on forums, even when those forums have captchas. Because forums so far don't have the nofollow attribute on outgoing links, expect more of it in the future.
Forum Profile Spam
Spambots register a user on a forum and add a homepage URL on registration, or fills out the signature on registration. One pass spamming. Since there's no default nofollow on those links, expect this kind of spam to grow in magnitude.
Examples: Forum Profile Spam
Guestbook Spam
Probably the oldest type of link spam, it has gotten so bad in recent years that unless well protected and monitored, guestbooks are not worth having anymore.
More: Guestbook spam
Link Spam
Links Spam or Web Spam is a more general catagory that contains Blog Spam, Wiki Spam, etc. It is related to and may be involved in Spamdexing, but it is the process of placing unwanted links to a site on many innocent and usually unrelated sites. It may increase hits (and ad impressions) on the spammer's site, but the real purpose is increasing a site's PageRank.
Contact Form Spam
Contact Form Spam is a sort of more general Form Spam (or Link Spam). However, there is a special attack targeted to buggy software. When a malicious user specifies his contact email as "some@email\r\nCc: email1, ..., emailN", his message might be sent to the emails "email1", ..., "emailN".
Referrer Spam
A spammer sends pages a fake referrer to pages in hopes that the page will display the link where search engines can index it. This should not be confused with referrers from small, lesser known search engines.
More: referrer spam at spywareinfo.com, and at WikiPedia
Spamdexing
Spamdexing is the unethical manipulation of search engine results to rank sites higher especially for unrelated keywords. This includes unethical site optimization. Things like cloaking, doorway pages, splogs, and other black hat SEO methods fall into this catagory. Link spamming is commonly used, but is not necessary to be considered spamdexing.
More: Spamdexing at wikipedia.org
Spim
Spammers send links to users on Instant Message networks. The purpose of this kind of spam is totally differnet from link spam. This spam is actually directed at users hoping for hits, ad impressions, and maybe customers.
Splog
The term splog comes from combining the words Spam and Blog. It is a form of spamdexing. Splogs are fake blogs often on free hosts that are setup to link to and therefore increase the PageRank of the spammer's other sites. Many also attempt to generate revenue from ads or affiliate redirects when human visitors reach the sites through search engines.
More: Splog at chongqed.org
Trackback Spam
Trackback spam is when spammers use the Trackback protocol (created by SixApart) to post their links to blogs. Because blogs are popular and well interlinked they often have good PageRank which the spammers try to take advantage of. This form of spam has been around for many years as Guestbook spam, but became a major problem as blogs became extrememly popular.
Trackback spam generally relies on the automated nature of trackbacks to insert many links in a wide variety of posts. It only affects blogging tools that accept Trackback, such as TypePad, Blogger, and MovableType blogs.
Web Spam
Any spam using the World Wide Web rather than some other internet application (like email)
See Link Spam.
Wiki Spam
With the openness of editing that wikis provide, spammers have expanded from blog and guestbook spam to wikis. This takes the form of placing links on various pages in a wiki to increase a certian site's relevance in Google and other search engines. Unlike blog spam, which leaves links as comments, wikispam is frequently destructive. Spammers placing their spam on a page do not care that it replaces existing content. Other spammers attempt to sneak their links into existing content. Luckily most wikis maintain a revision history and if caught before a clean revision expires the content can be recovered.
More: WikiSpam at chongqed.org
