Spam

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

What could the spammers be getting out of posting Asian-language spam on a primarily English-language forum? Usually (well, before this recent spate of junk) if I see spam on Mobileread or any other English-language forum, the spam is also in English and has a title like "get a great deal on an iphone" in order to entice people to click through to some other site. I expect that kind of spam probably draws at least a few clicks from the gullible so there's a reason the spammers keep doing it, but I can't imagine that posting Asian-language spam on Mobileread is getting clicks.

It's not about getting clicks on Mobileread (not by our membership, anyway). It's about manipulating SEO. Mobileread is a popular site and gets crawled/indexed by Google regularly. Do a google search for the topic of a popular/active discussion on MR and see how high an MR link ranks in the results (and how quickly it gets there).

That's where their clicks ultimately result from: Korean-speaking people search for stuff on Google and Mobileread spam posts/threads (and the links they contain) get presented to them early and often. In turn, the googlebots (and other search engine's crawlers) turn to the websites the spammers are pimping when the links their spam here contains gain enough visibility.

Every second a spam post/topic stays visible on MR (or anywhere) translates to an opportunity for that post and its contents to get indexed.

What can normally take months to happen "organically" can happen overnight: links to their sites very high in search-engine rankings.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

What could the spammers be getting out of posting Asian-language spam on a primarily English-language forum? Usually (well, before this recent spate of junk) if I see spam on Mobileread or any other English-language forum, the spam is also in English and has a title like "get a great deal on an iphone" in order to entice people to click through to some other site. I expect that kind of spam probably draws at least a few clicks from the gullible so there's a reason the spammers keep doing it, but I can't imagine that posting Asian-language spam on Mobileread is getting clicks.

I do appreciate the work the moderators are doing to get rid of it.

I think this may be more of a 'denial of service' type attack' Someone getting 'even' for some sort of slieght

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It's not about getting clicks on Mobileread (not by our membership, anyway). It's about manipulating SEO. Mobileread is a popular site and gets crawled/indexed by Google regularly. Do a google search for the topic of a popular/active discussion on MR and see how high an MR link ranks in the results (and how quickly it gets there).

That's where their clicks ultimately result from: Korean-speaking people search for stuff on Google and Mobileread spam posts/threads (and the links they contain) get presented to them early and often. In turn, the googlebots (and other search engine's crawlers) turn to the websites the spammers are pimping when the links their spam here contains gain enough visibility.

Every second a spam post/topic stays visible on MR (or anywhere) translates to an opportunity for that post and its contents to get indexed.

What can normally take months to happen "organically" can happen overnight: links to their sites very high in search-engine rankings.

Thanks for the explanation - that makes sense.

I'm glad to see from the thread at the top of the General forum that things are now under control!