Spammer for President?
I have recently picked up on a new way that webmasters are spamming other sites to increase their Google juice. Their goal is to get the link to their site on as many other sites as possible, to make Google give them a high page ranking. I took notice to this practice as I noticed some weird referrers in my stats pages the other day. According to my stats page, a small percentage of the hits to my site were from people selling educational videos on the mating practices of a particular hotel heiress. Curious as to why the hell these people were linking to me, I copied the link into my browser and went to see if in fact they had a link to my site. I searched the page, I searched the HTML source code, but I did not find any links to my site. This was how I learned of this “stat spamming” strategy to increase traffic to one’s website.
I am not sure of the details, but what these sites do to convince your site that they are sending you traffic. Perhaps they have programs that send false hits to large numbers of sites identifying their own site as the referrer. This gets their link in the stats pages, and sometimes front pages, of all of these target sites on the web. When Google sees all of these links back to this spamming site, it gets a false representation of the site’s popularity, and gives it higher status. This allows these spammers to hijack the top spot for a particular search string. All the sites need to do is to get a link to their site on as many pages as possible. The fact that they are attacking stat pages, which are generally not even public, only shows that they are intentionally being sneaky.
In an attempt to deny juice to these people, I took a few minutes to password protect my stats page, which I should have done already. Having done that, I figured that I was done with this and just resigned myself to accept the occasional odd porn site in my referrer logs. What really surprised me today, was the site of the latest “stat spammer” in my logs. Apparently, the democrats are taking tips from the pornsters, and have jumped on the spam wagon. The latest stat spammer to visit my site was none other than democratic front runner John Kerry.
Doesn’t this just seem wrong? Has this spamming practice been deemed acceptable? The spamming site, http://blog.johnkerry.com/, ends with the disclaimer “Paid for by John Kerry for President, Inc.”, so is the spamming ultimately John Kerry’s decision. All the current TV ads require that the candidate claim responsibility for their messages, should this apply to web site practices as well?
I am not even sure if I should even be annoyed by this, afterall, where is the harm. My site is not damaged, and I suffer no real ill effects, but…efforts were made to use my web space, without my consent, to assist the John Kerry campaign.
Is this fair?
Do I own my web space? Is this trespassing?
I do not think that anything illegal has been done here, but perhaps only by current definitions. Obviously, if this campaign hijacked my phone line for their own purposes it would be a crime. If they chose to stick a sign in my front yard without asking, it would be trespassing. What about putting a link to their site on my web space without my consent?
If John Kerry becomes President, will he push for more laws against spam?
Do I want a spammer for president? Do you?
Did John Kerry “stat spam” your blog?