Why Your Site Gets Link Spammed

Danny Sullivan recently posted a rant about link spam where he uses his wife’s site as a sympathy case to display his hatred for link spam.

Danny, I agree 100% with you that link spam is evil and that people who do it should DIAF, but I also think the responsibility lies on the webmaster to prevent the spam.

It’s not that hard to prevent automated link spam. Sad sympathy story aside, your wife’s site got spammed because she let it get spammed – the rest of the back story doesn’t matter.

As somebody who’s done his fair share of messing around with black hat SEO, I can tell you that link spam attacks are rarely (if ever) directed at any specific sites. Choosing targets takes too much time. When I wanted to spam I simply pulled out a copy of my spamming software, (see xrumer) pointed it at a Google search result for content unique to a standard wordpress, drupal, joomla, phpbb, or whatever install, and let it run.

There’s millions of sites out there all using the same backends – and that’s what makes spam so easy.

The trick to fighting spam lies in separating yourself from the crowd. Change the file name, add a required form field, put in a captcha or a mathcha, hell you can even implement kitten auth if you want.

It really doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you differentiate yourself from the host of other sites using the exact same form as you. Once you do that, the automated bots won’t be able to post and your spam will drastically decrease.

On this site, I simply added a box that says “type Ryan in the box”. When I did that, I went from averaging 250 spam posts per day to 3 – so I know it works.

Again, I agree with you that link spam is evil (recently it’s even becoming less effective thanks to Google,) but you can’t blame the spammers for walking through the open door you gave them. It’s irresponsible to blame the community for your wife’s own laziness and unwillingness to properly design her site.

7 comments October 19th, 2009