Link Spam: What it is and how to protect your site

"Link Spam" is a growing threat to the Internet as a whole. One
of the most powerful concepts introduced by the Internet is a
non-geographic, interest-bound system of communities. The blogs,
guestbooks, forums, and wikis that you frequent are all
locations where you can contribute to and learn from a body of
knowledge previously unavailable. Unfortunately, the same
openness of these communities leaves them vulnerable for the
growing threat of link spam.

Link spam is a growing method used by "black hat" search engine
optimizers to improve their search engine rankings by acquiring
huge quantities of links back to their sites. Using automated
programs to cycle through long lists of blogs, wikis, forums,
etc. these programs automatically post to these locations with
links back to their sites in the content. Below, I address a few
of these types of spam, and the best available solution.

Blog Spam: Blog spam is perhaps the most notorious and common
method of link spam today. There are, however, multiple types of
blog spam to deal with, although there is a common denominator.
The two most common types of blog spam are comment spam and
trackback spam. Comment spam is perhaps the most obvious type of
spam. Comment spam occurs when unmoderated comments are posted
to a blog entry with dubious links included. Comment spam can
easily be automated, even through logins and, sometimes,
CAPTCHAs. Trackback Spam is a little more complicated.
Trackbacks are a method of content amalgamation - letting
authors know of other interesting information on the web
relating to their article. By automating a trackback request, a
black hat search engine optimizer can get your blog to post a
link back to the black hatter's website

Forum Spam: Forum spam has two methods as well. The most common
is forum post spam. In forum post spam, users post large numbers
of comments in an automated fashion with links either included
in the content or in the footer. Unless the forum is closely
moderated, these types of posts get published and indexed by the
search engines, improving the rankings of the blackhatters site.
Profile Spam is another new form of forum spam. In profile spam,
the blackhatter needs only to create a login for the forum, with
the link listed in the profile, for them to acquire the backlink
they want. By automating this procedure, they can acquire links
off of your site without ever posting at all to the forum.

Guestbook Spam: Guestbook spam is the oldest trick in the book.
Useless entries like "I like your site, here is mine: link",
fill up defenseless guestbooks across the web. While the search
engines have done a decent job to stop counting guestbook spam,
it is still prevalent and going strong. Like the other types of
spam listed above, there is a common thread that makes them easy
to capture and remove.

Wiki Spam: Wiki spam is the newest kid on the block. Wikis allow
almost anyone to edit the content of a page. If a crafty black
hatter can hide the link into a wiki page (especially those that
allow for HTML and CSS), their job is done. Automating this
procedure is particularly easy as well, as most wikis do not
require a login and, even worse, accessing each edit page
requires a simple url change. Furthermore, many wikis allow for
page creation on-the-fly without moderation. This is an
incredibly easy way to get a lot of links onto your Wiki without
your permission.

There is hope though. The common thread between all link spam is
just that - links. If a link spammer cannot acquire a lot of
links, they have failed. Thus, the solution is an internet-wide
throttle on user-submitted link acquisition. Sounds complicated
eh? Well, it is not. LinkSleeve: http://www.linksleeve.org, a
free, XML-RPC based system already works with a large number of
the most popular systems out there to prevent link spam.
Furthermore, because it is platform independent and uses the
XML-RPC standard, it can be integrated into almost any software,
period. There is even an integration with Blogger to prevent
Blogger Spam. LinkSleeve is a community wide approach to
fighting Link Spam, and because of its ubiquitous availability,
it is most capable of addressing the issue on an internet wide
level.

More free articles from http://www.articlesroom.com