Recently, a phenomenon known as blog spam has spread across the internet.
Essentially, this is ordinary SEO spam that uses popular online platforms for promotion.
Most often, the publication consists of loosely connected and meaningless text, either artificially generated (), or compiled from several existing sources by an author who is not an expert in the subject matter and thoughtlessly copies bits of text, often contradicting each other.
Let's consider such a publication using the example of
an open blogging platform like habr.com, where is placed. To avoid appearing as spam, it initially hyperlinks. However, after a week, the author edits the material, adding what it was all about — a neat link to their body shop.
For further promotion, a link to this publication is given somewhere else, for example, using the mechanism described in : the link to a regular spam distributor on reddit.com.
And to top it off, quite a naive "trick" — the author registers under another account and comments on their post, of course in glowing terms.
As a result, we have what appears to be a respectable publication, which nonetheless distorts the very essence of a blog as a source of information, replacing useful content with meaningless surrogates.
Why is this bad?
Spam can be compared to pollution.
Just as garbage pollutes our planet, worsening the living conditions on it, spam pollutes the informational space. When we search for something on Google, instead of useful information written by an expert, we are served heaps of such trash, making it increasingly difficult to find something useful.
Moreover, for popular online platforms, this phenomenon becomes a real disaster.
In thematic communities on reddit.com, such links are posted continuously, several times a day, adding to the workload of moderators and cluttering the information feed for subscribers. Although this is currently an isolated incident on Habré, with the rising popularity of the English-speaking segment, such attempts to exploit the platform for promotion will increase. We need to prepare for this in advance.
Source: habr.com
