A $250,000 REMINDER THAT “CASL” IS NOT JUST AN ANTI-SPAM LAW •
Spam-Me-Not
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Spam-Me-Not Greg Salt Purple Dogfish
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We all love to be wanted but some advances can be a little uncomfortable. Spam, especially member profile spam, is a pervasive problem for any membership site. We'll take a short journey through the dark underbelly of the Internet and take a look at spammers; who they are, why they do it, the tools they use and some common operating methods. We'll finish with a look at some mitigation strategies for ExpressionEngine and how we can help each other as a community.
Transcript of Spam-Me-Not
Spam-Me-NotGreg Salt
Purple Dogfish
Profile Spam
The posting of links or plain text within a site member profile such that it is not displayed or visible when browsing or using the site normally
Cross Platform
Why?
• Some are traditional ‘SEO Experts’
• Many are spammers who want to scam other potential spammers
• Convince others that they’ve found a system that makes money
• Sell internet properties/ebooks etc
Business Ideas!
Spammer Lifeforms
Primordial Soup• Unsophisticated
• Generally direct posts into forums and blog comments
• “Great post! www.buypills.com”
Developing Tools• Link Generators
• Profile Creators/Bots
• Search Engine Scrapers
Inventing the Wheel
Source: http://www.seo-back-links.com/link_wheel.htm
A number of independent web 2.0 sites, all with high Page Rank values, create a link to your site. And each of the "spokes" create a link to its neighbour - forming the wheel.
Link Wheel
www.dealerbid.co.uk
http://an-ee-site.com/member/1316/
Learning to Share• Preying on lesser
lifeforms
• Selling link packets, bots and sites
Masters of Disguise• Register then wait a
few weeks before coming back to update profile
• Will probably never post in forums but will login from time to time
• Wrapping links around punctuation
Masters of Disguise
Who’s Responsible?
Angela Edwards
Submit Comment
Automatic Profile Creators
uSMF – SMF Forums Profile Creator
uPun – PunBB Forums Profile Creator
uExpress – Expression Engine Forums Profile Creator
Vbulletin Profile Generator – Vbulletin Forums Profile Creator
Leave a Reply
Name (required)
Mail (will not be published) (required)
Website
angelae8654Automatic Profile Backlinks
angelae8654
Paul Johnson
ExpressionEngine Bots
backlinkengines.com
Bot Weakness
• Not yet updated to deal with EE2 registration form (email verification)
• Can’t deal with anything non-standard
• Captchas do cause problems
• No built-in facility to use proxies
• Forced to use the same username/email/IP across all the sites
What Can We Do?
Site Setup
• Remove ability for guests to view profiles
• Don’t use default member registration form fields
• In forums remove active/newest members list
• Set up admin notifications for registrations and new posts
Site Management
• Update Blacklist module regularly
• Use the EE member banning features - never delete
• Use community to flag/report spam
• Check your new members everyday
• Approve membership
• Use newbie member groups
Community
• Report wheel links to other sites
• Report SEO spam to client company
Fight Back!
The response...
Source: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/186455-what-if-you-reported-google-spam.html#post1667639
We weren’t bluffing
You can report link spam at:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport
Tick ‘Other’ and add ‘link spam’ in the comments box
