4 ms·

What exactly is a spam blog? Is it the same with arbitrage? How does it know what content to display (as the author says it should be automated)?

by phektus 15y ago

Isofarro 15y ago
Some spam blogfarms play the arbitrage game with Adsense, but it's more profitable for them to use GoogleAds to pull traffic in and push visitors towards their affiliate links. Content tends to be scraped content, sometimes Markov chained or other spinning methods. The content to display is based on keywords. Depending on the spam website solution, the automation is done on a number of levels (depending on the blogfarm technique): * WordpressMU with wildcard subdomains based on a spreadsheet of keywords * Automated set up of Blogger blogs (either using Captcha breakers, Mechanical turk, or just asking the user to solve captchas 10 at a time) * Automated publishing of content via XMLRPC (for wordpress and/or blogger), or other interfaces. Then almost always ping-servers are pinged. * Automated creation of websites given a template and a heap of content - sometimes Markoved sometimes spun. Grabbing content either through screen scraping, RSS, text files, anything they can get their hands on. (They tried wikipedia for a while, last time I looked, they were dabbling with Yahoo answers for both content and inbound links) * automated link building. Basically finding fingerprints of known no-rel-follow tools - like Pligg, Wordpress on edu/gov domains etc. Includes automated comment spam to build inbound links. It does surprise me the lengths the successful spammers go to in blogspam and spam websites. They figure out this is still more profitable than building real long-term value and writing interesting content. Sometimes I think it's one of those "beat Google at it's own game", and the rush of earning quick money.

4 ms·

What exactly is a spam blog? Is it the same with arbitrage? How does it know what content to display (as the author says it should be automated)?

by phektus 15y ago

What exactly is a spam blog? Is it the same with arbitrage? How does it know what content to display (as the author says it should be automated)?

Isofarro 15y ago
Some spam blogfarms play the arbitrage game with Adsense, but it's more profitable for them to use GoogleAds to pull traffic in and push visitors towards their affiliate links. Content tends to be scraped content, sometimes Markov chained or other spinning methods. The content to display is based on keywords. Depending on the spam website solution, the automation is done on a number of levels (depending on the blogfarm technique): * WordpressMU with wildcard subdomains based on a spreadsheet of keywords * Automated set up of Blogger blogs (either using Captcha breakers, Mechanical turk, or just asking the user to solve captchas 10 at a time) * Automated publishing of content via XMLRPC (for wordpress and/or blogger), or other interfaces. Then almost always ping-servers are pinged. * Automated creation of websites given a template and a heap of content - sometimes Markoved sometimes spun. Grabbing content either through screen scraping, RSS, text files, anything they can get their hands on. (They tried wikipedia for a while, last time I looked, they were dabbling with Yahoo answers for both content and inbound links) * automated link building. Basically finding fingerprints of known no-rel-follow tools - like Pligg, Wordpress on edu/gov domains etc. Includes automated comment spam to build inbound links. It does surprise me the lengths the successful spammers go to in blogspam and spam websites. They figure out this is still more profitable than building real long-term value and writing interesting content. Sometimes I think it's one of those "beat Google at it's own game", and the rush of earning quick money.