Search Engine Optimization made easy - SEO terminology 101 part 4

24 January, 2008 (09:35) | Increasing Traffic, Search Engine Optimization | By: clive

USING WORLD-WRITABLE PAGES

Some spammers use sites such as Wikis and blogs that can be edited by users, to post links, etc in the comments.

Spam in blogs

Any site that accepts visitor comments is a target. Spammers place keywords in the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Guest books, forums and blogs are particularly vulnerable and are often victims of drive by spamming where automated software creates nonsense posts with unwanted and irrelevant links.

Comment spam

Comment spam is a form of link spam and occurs in web pages that allow user editing such as in Wikis, blogs and guest books where automatic programs can add spamming links to user edited pages.

Wiki spam

Spammers edit the Wiki pages and add their spam links which are usually unrelated to the Wiki content. Wikipedia has implemented a nofollow value for the ‘rel’ HTML attribute. Links with this attribute are ignored by the Google’s PageRank algorithm. Hopefully this will discourage this type of spam.

Referrer log spamming

Some websites have a referrer log, which shows which pages link to that site. Robots are then used to access many sites repeatedly with a message or specific address given as the referrer. That message or internet address then appears in the referrer log. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referrer-log spamming may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer’s sites, by getting the referrer logs of many sites to link to them.

see part 1 for general SEO terminolgy
see part 2 for Spamdexing: Content Spam
see part 3 for Spamdexing: Link Spam
see Part 4 for Spamdexing: World-Writable Pages
see part 5 for Spamdexing: other types