spam linking on the rise

[cteno4]

If any of you out there manage web sites, beware of a spamming technique that has been around for a while seems to be on the rise lately. a number of clients have gotten very confused by these messages and wasted an hour or two before they passed it to me to tell them forget it.

 

it goes like this. the main email address for a site gets an email from usually a gmail account that looks like someone has forwarded this more internal message about problems with a bad link in the site and a response in there from someone else with the proper link to correct it (usually a .info). the bad link is indeed a bad link and the new link usually contains this generic looking (very innocuous) content on what the old link was about.

 

well its all a scam. they spider the site for bad links then make up generic content pages on the subjects on client's web pages to get these links from your site, all in order to get search engine ranking improvements from crosslinking related content.

 

every time its gotten everyone befuddled because it really is a bad link on their site so this gives the email cred and they think its forwarded from the old bad link or some other org that knows them from an internal emails there. cleaver but insidious!

 

just popped up on 3 clients in the last couple of weeks.

 

while the current SER attempt is nothing really harmful, it could later have something malicious at the link so very dangerous there.

 

i keep telling clients dont trust anything at all that comes in like this and send it to me right away, but that lasts a week and then its usually a couple of hours lost on their end before they finally ask... clients, cant shootem, cant eat without them...

 

cheers

 

jeff

[CaptOblivious]

Ugh. Thanks for giving us all the heads up!

[cteno4]

its amazing they will go to these lengths, this one was pretty sophisticated with the spider to find the broken link in the right content. it must have a list of keywords for each of the pages it wants to do the ser bump for and look for sites with potential content and probably good ser scores, then look for links in there that are broken in them going to similar content they have set up, then generates the email. all can be done with programming though! not just an email for $16M from nigeria anymore...

 

jeff