Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Spammer Wannabe

There is a spammer who is now calling me a Warlord. Since I am involved with the war on spam that really doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is how scared of chongqed.org he is, all of our sites made his antispammer blacklist.

For those who read here or Ann's blog, you can probably figure out who I am talking about. He doesn't believe he is a blackhat spammer because it is all shades of grey anyway. I have decided not even to nofollow link to him anymore, he is just trying to make a name for himself among other spammers.

He says my sidebar of spammy keywords is violating Google's guidelines. You are they "grey hat" spammer, what do you care about guidelines? Since my blog discuses spammers and their keywords and how stupid you spammers are, it is not off topic for me to use those same keywords.

He also calls my blog a doorway. Clearly he is an expert spammer to identify a blog as a doorway. If this is a doorway how do I convince people to read it? You will also notice there are no ads or affiliate links anywhere on our chongqed sites. We aren't doing this for the money, there is none and it takes up a good deal of our time. We are doing this because spammers are wreaking the internet and must be stopped.

He is now likely to whine that this is another personal attack against him. Call it whatever you want. He is a spammer, what do you expect them to say?

Comments:
Yes, he is a spammer, but you...you stupid, I see.
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Do you have any evidence for your claim, Sergei would be a spammer? I somehow can't find it in your article. If it's so plain clear, it wouldn't be a problem to add some quotes or links for verification, would it?

Also I don't understand why spammers stuffing keywords is something bad and you doing the same is suddenly something good. This logically doesn't make any sense as each time search results are polluted with irrelevancy, but luckily search engines treat both cases equally: They ignore it after a while.

While I agree that any sort of spam is an annoyance, in particular the sort of spam where the initiater doesn't care about actual results, I entirely disagree with your war terminology and simplistic "we good" <-> "they bad" scheme you're trying to apply to this phenomenom.

It's a pity, because your wiki isn't that bad. but as long as quotes like:

We would like to slam the nuts of every spammer in the world in large iron door before having them raped to death by a gang of rabid apes ODed on vigra!

are associated with your "war", I don't want to belong to your camp. Sorry, but compared to such primitive outbursts of verbal violence every Russian / Ukrainian link spammer is clearly the minor evil.

Olliver
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If you read Sergei's blog it is clear he is somehow involved in spamming. I just don't have any solid proof of how yet.

As long as someone is not also stuffing keywords on innocent people's sites as link spammers do, it is not hurting anything but search relevance. I don't like it that sites pollute search results this way, and I don't like that we have a small part of that too. But the spam that we are interested in is that that damages other people's sites or services.

Our small contribution to SERP pollution is no where near what the spammers we list are already doing. Our few pages for a spammed term are not likely to come up before legitimate pages for things other than pure spammy keywords. We do not optimize those pages to be relevant to the keywords. Each page contains the same information about spamming. That is why you couldn't find them in your searches.

We never add keywords to the existing junk out there. We only use spamvertzied keywords. Our purpose in doing this is to educate people who find us when searching for one of those keywords or spammer domains.

I really hope that someday soon chongqing keywords are no longer necessary or possible. I will be very happy when Google's algorithms are smart enough to heavily punish our "stuffing keywords" because that means they are also doing it to all the spammers too. That might finally put an end to the destructive practices of link spammers.

We are not fighting for better SERPs; that is a search engine problem to fix. What we are fighting is the crap ruining wikis, blogs, forums, etc.

The quote you complained about was done on a site we at chongqed.org had no knowledge of until Sergei emailed me. Since then I have been in contact with the site owner. Things are much improved and it now has a disclaimer that it "is not affiliated with nor endorsed by chongqed.org."

His clearly over the top fantasy was just a way to demonstrate his hatred of spamming. I find it really hard to believe anyone would actually torture and kill someone over spamming. Of course, that doesn't make me feel any less worried when spammers are the ones making the far more specific death threats.

If you read our wiki, we do provide a lot of information on how to prevent, report, and cleanup spam. But many site owners don't think they are technically capable enough to do things even as simple as using .htaccess.

We also often report spam, sometimes it works, often it doesn't. Many support contacts don't even understand what link spam is. Even once convinced it is a problem some do nothing about it because their TOS only states that users are not allowed to send spam emails.

But educating people how to deal with it only works for those affected by it. No one else cares until it directly affects them. That is why our spammers keyword pages are important. Education that linkspam is a problem is just as important as education how to deal with it.
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