Keyvan Nayyeri

Those who have a blog, specifically an active blog, should have noticed the recent growth in the number of spam comments that try to promote specific keywords mainly for “B-u-s-b-y S-E-O”.

First of all, let me give a background about this context because I guess there are many audience who don’t know about it. The other day I saw a blog where the owner had left a comment to thank a B-u-s-b-y commenter for his comment, and after reading this post, you can understand how it put smile on my face!

A company that asserts its specialty in search engine optimization and online advertising started a context that is actually a competition with some prizes where they ask ordinary web visitors to leave context on sites and blogs with some specific keywords, and promote a URL with those keywords. They look for the top ranked sites in search engine results and choose it as the winner.

As you can guess, the main idea behind this dirty context is encouraging vast majority of web users to participate in spamming and help them in SEO. Also it’s obvious that such a context can encourage many normal users to participate because unlike experienced users, they don’t care about anything. This dirty business can yield such an extensive attitude for spamming on the web with a very cheaper cost for the original company.

This has been such an annoying thing for bloggers and there are many reactions against it. Some developers wrote and published simple tools to block such comments, but generally this has been a widespread progress on the web.

The worst point about this context is that it’s some kind of modern spamming done by real human, so many of the common spam filtering tools such as CAPTHCA controls cannot filter this type of spam. However, their Achilles heel is their keywords that allow any adaptive algorithm to recognize them quickly.

In the past 1-2 months or so I’ve been monitoring the progress of this context on Waegis, and it received tons of spam items that participate in this context. Luckily, the nature of online services is the best way to block such items because they can adapt quickly to new changes by spammers, so Waegis, Akismet, and similar services have been able to block such items in the first few days of their appearance.

But the worst point that is a potential dangerous for the web is their ability to extend this idea to a real business which is ostensibly their main goal. If they do that, then CAPTHCA controls will be out of order, and a serious challenge comes up for the quality of the context on the web.

As the title of this post suggests, this is a start point for the next generation of spamming and a very dirty business on the web. I don’t think this has such an impact on adaptive spam filtering methods, but no one can gainsay that this can have many problems for webmasters.

Regardless of the work that this company is doing, I just want to refer back to something that I always have stated about such businesses that are categorized as spamming. The best possible way to stop spamming is legislation of strict laws worldwide. Current laws are really weak and cannot distract spammers from what they do. This is not something limited to specific countries, and almost all the countries have shown weaknesses in their laws against online crime especially spamming.

Of course, this is for spammers who don’t show their identity publicly and can disappear from public eyes. Now we see that a company is officially doing this without worrying about anything, and it’s more interesting when we see that this company has published its profile online and has left phone numbers for its agencies in the US/Canada, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. In my honest opinion this is terrible and shows the inability of laws in all the countries against spamming!

All in all, I hope that we see better laws for online activities and more importantly, we see a real action from the governments.