Finance:Spamvertising
Spamvertising is the practice of sending email spam in order to advertise a website. The word is a portmanteau of the words spam and advertising.
The word also refers to vandalizing blogs, online forums or wikis with hyperlinks in order to attain a higher search engine ranking for the vandal's website. Spamvertisers insert links to their websites (typically, sites purporting to sell a commercial product) and add keywords of common or related searches. The apparent goal is that a search engine will find the vandalized page full of links and improve the popularity rating of the pages to which they link. This is typically done by automated editing programs which look for editable text fields in web forms and automatically fill them in with web links. The links typically lead to pills, porn, and poker sites.
It is recommended that you do not click on these links, as they could be phishing links or may contain malware.
Most legitimate website providers do not tolerate this practice and will delete any site that has been spamvertised.
The practice has led to many editable online resources employing anti-spam countermeasures, including the use of captchas in order to prevent automated editing.
See also
- Referrer spam
- Spam (electronic)
- Wikipedia Signpost article on the nofollow tag
- Wikipedia guidelines for acceptable external links
- nofollow
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