Comment Spam

From the Sidelines has had a visitor named “fati” from Casablanca, Morocco attempt to post twice during the past two days on different referral spam posts. The content of the comments is the same:

It's easy way to make money
Super-Duper Easy Way to Earn Money By
Promoting A link - 0.5$ per Referral Link Visit.
-Register
-Share Refferral Link
-Earn Money on every visit

A shortened shortened link is also included. I’m not going to click that for obvious reasons.

It’s fascinating to see how prevalent “black hat” methods of generating income from ads on the Net have become. Some of this is typical of how underhanded people always exploit anything that can be exploited. But I’m also becoming aware that some of this is a reaction to how hard it is to make money from running advertisements on a website these days.

Money is tighter and tighter in the current world economy that’s teetering on collapse and ads have always been nebulous in results. With the Web coming into being, actual viewing and response to ads has become a harder science than it was. Results can be tabulated in near real time, targeting has become extremely refined, and wasted efforts easier to avoid.

Google has tried refining its search indexing protocols (SERPS) to downgrade black hat method using sites, but is losing the war while taking out innocent bystanders. They also are in the business to make money and favor branded economic sites over “mom and pop” small businesses now. Reading the pain going on for some of them and how some are turning to “the dark side” to survive, I have to wonder if the mess can be resolved in any good way at all.

My posts on spam, especially of the referral type on Blogger, came about due to the lack of information about the links showing up in my stats. They are a public service endeavor which has led me to learn about things I had no clue about in the financial ecosystem of Web advertising and search results. I’ll never be an expert, but from the amount of hits the posts have gotten at least some information got relayed to those who needed it.

So these public service announcements will continue though they annoy me to write.