The great majority of Online users are aware of spam. Who hasn't gotten an e-mail permitting them to know they have just won the lottery in Nigeria? Or pretending to be your bank and asking for your account details to be able to “confirm” them? Despite the publicity spamming has already established in the last couple of years, thousands of people turn out to be sufferers of these scams annually. Let us take a deeper look at the different kinds of spam.
First of all, spamming methods may be divided into two major categories, e-mail spam, and spamdexing, which means spamming in search engines like google.
E-mail spam has become the form of spam most users have encountered. It's just pre-approved offers that tries to deceive you into sharing personal information, or redirects you to a website including harmful content. Spamdexing can be a kind of Black Hat SEO (Search engine optimization) that manipulates the prominence of certain sites when utilizing search engines. It can be split into Content Spam and Link Spam. This content spam technique involves changing just how search engines reads web pages in order to produce a page more popular in searches. Keyword stuffing, Hidden text, Meta tag stuffing, Doorway Pages and Scraper sites are kinds of Content Spam.
Keyword or Meta Tag Stuffing: This requires loading a web page with carefully chosen keywords that may raise the website’s popularity when one of those keywords is sought out. These words may be placed in the actual content of the page or in its Meta Tags.
Hidden Text: This sort of search engine manipulation calls for text to have a similar colour as the page’s background, therefore which makes it invisible. This text is probably not visible by visitors, but it's read by engines like google and will lead to a growth of the website’s popularity.
Doorway Pages: They're pages specifically designed for spamdexing. After they come up as a google listing and someone visits them, they automatically redirect visitors to another page using some kind of Cloaking approach, i.e. showing different web pages to human users and check engine bots.
Scraper Sites: These are web sites that copy the information of other sites while using illegal technique of web scraping. Most of them earn profits from this by loading their page with adverts which visitors can click on. These are also known as Made For AdSense (MFA) web sites.
Link spam manipulates rating algorithms, including Google’s PageRank, to be able to promote particular sites. Forms of Link Spam include Link Farms, Hidden Links, Page hijacking and Google Bombs. More specifically:
Link Farms: Also known as spam blogs, they are groups of websites that link to one another, to be able to enhance their popularity in engines like google.
Hidden Links: Just like the Hidden text technique, they are links placed in obscure locations of an internet page so that visitors will not see them. This really is beneficial because highlighted text ranks higher than normal text in engines like google.
Page Hijacking: Also referred to as Typosquatting, this requires buying domains which can be very similar to those of popular websites (e.g.: “www.gooogle.com”, “en.wiipedia.org” etc) to be able to make their page rank higher whenever an user accidentally visits their page. A lot of time the victim websites will attempt and spend the money for scammers off, that could happen to be their intention all along. Not many cases reach the courts.
Google Bombs: Another kind of manipulation of Google's PageRank algorithm. This requires a great deal of web sites using constant anchor text in order to link a practically irrelevant site to a web search. The first instance of this was one that caused the key phrase “more evil than Satan himself” to produce Microsoft's home page as the highest ranked result.