New form of spam targets bloggers

Posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008. Filed under Blogging, Consumerism, design.

Spammers are clearly running out of ideas. Today I came across a new form of spam that targets incoming links on blogs and other sites. I like to call this ‘Incoming link spam’.

Anyone with a WordPress blog, for example, will know the ‘Incoming Links’ section on their dashboard that displays information on who is linking to your blog. I checked the dashboard on one of my sites today and noticed a link that was quite obviously spam.

What the spammer does is create a page with a link to your site on it. If you visit that page it displays momentarily before redirecting to the spammer’s target site.

The in-between site displays for just a moment. It’s too quick for me to even get a screen grab of.

I haven’t seen this before, but perhaps I’m alone in that. Has anyone else been a victim of Incoming link spam? I guess the race is now on to develop a WordPress plugin that filters it out. Of course, not many people follow all their incoming links, which shows exactly how desperate spammers are getting. WordPress isn’t the only CMS with the abusable functionality, I’m just using it as an example because all my sites are powered by it.

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  • What I am guessing on this one is that the spammers are trying to take advantage of is the trackbacks. It doesn't seem very effective though in my opinion, but what spam is really? I just had a stupid IM conversation today with someone trying to get me to input my CC and Debit card information, give me a break!
  • Yes I get alot of this spam over at the fring blog I manage, it's getting very bad, and I find myself checking every incoming link, it uses up alot of time but it's for the best of fringsters. Some of the spam points to viagra stuff while other stuff links to porn. Grrr the evil spam empire will be first to be shot when the revolution comes..
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