Wiki Link Spam Tactic

Garrett · #1 (**permalink**) 06-01-2004, 05:33 PM

Wiki - I first saw the word in "wikipedia," though I didn't know it wiki had anything to do with the creation of the information I read there.

A wiki page allows people to post any text they want to that page, including links to their site, and they're emerging as a major weapon in the nigritude ultramarine battle.

Of course wikis emerged not as an SEO tool but as a means of collaborating on content. The Wikipedia is one example of how this can work. For their entry on "wiki" you simply click edit and see a page similar to a forum posting page where you can alter the text.

The Wikipedia creators hope that you add to their definitions, correct spelling, create .

As wikis have been around since 2001 (1995 actually - thanks HardCoded) they've developed methods for dealing with vandalism, including banning IP addresses, IP blocks in the case of persistant vandals from major ISPs and, of course, databasing their entries. However, "more problematic are subtle errors inserted into pages which go undetected, for example changing of album release dates and discographies on Wikipedia."

Philipp Lenssen, in his quest for top position for the term Nigritude Ultramarine (he's at second place now), has spammed many a wiki, as he says in this blog post.

Rather than busting up the hard work at Wikipedia or any of the other more organized wikis, Philip focused on the sandbox wikis - wikis set up just for play/free posting. (Not that the sandbox policy is an invitation for your links.)

Besides being a very shady method of link building, "everybody is... ...free to delete your links and replace them with their own. This makes it a constant game of going through a lot of sandboxes and leaving your backlink. In fact when I visited the sandboxes I found a lot of links already pointing to other Nigritude Ultramarine sites; or links pointing to commercial sites using commercial search phrases."

While I do believe that, as Ammon Johns said, "there are no hats," this particular method of building back links seems to take undue license with other people's projects. It's on par with guest book spamming and "me too" forum posts to build links.

Still, it's a tactic that your competitors may be using to rank higher. Search for their business name + wiki and see what comes up. If you find your competitor's gone on a wiki spamming spree and you're really feeling snarky write up a form letter decrying their tactics and follow their wiki trail. Be sure to send a copy to the wiki owner along with their IP address.

bhartzer · #2 (**permalink**) 06-01-2004, 06:04 PM

Are these wiki spammers using automated tools to post or are they doing this all by hand?

HardCoded · #3 (**permalink**) 06-01-2004, 08:51 PM

Quote:

As wikis have been around since 2001...

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory

ferret77 · #4 (**permalink**) 06-01-2004, 10:29 PM

Pretty sweet

i wonder if there is free software to set one of those up

HardCoded · #5 (**permalink**) 06-01-2004, 10:37 PM

I just took a look at this:
http://www.hotscripts.com/cgi-bin/se...wiki&catid=all
but was surprised to find that none of them look very complete. There's a couple of PHP classes/parsers that would let you buld a wiki, but nothing right out of the box.

There's a much more complete list here:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines

ferret77 · #6 (**permalink**) 06-02-2004, 10:13 AM

some of the wiki sandboxes have pr3-4

philipp · #7 (**permalink**) 06-02-2004, 11:25 AM

I did not use bots to fill the Wiki Sandboxes. I know others did.

By the way, I would not compare this to guestbook spamming. Wiki Sandboxes specifically ask you to play around with editing. Guestbooks ask you to leave a meaningful message. Sandboxes are not intended to be read by humans -- they consist of nothing but nonsense anyway.

Garrett · #8 (**permalink**) 06-02-2004, 12:43 PM

Hi Philipp,

I was quick to make that comparison between Wiki and guest book spamming... and I haven't been to many wiki sandboxes.

Do wiki sandbox creators want to help sites rank higher in search engines though?

They create wikis for people to play in - you're essentially working (though I know you're having lots of fun with the Nigritude Ultramarine contest - congrats on your 2nd place listing).

I think here you would reiterate your point that wiki sandboxes aren't intended for human consumption. That I can't answer to - I haven't talked with any wiki creators, but I imagine if they knew the value of links we'd see the rise (and rapid fall) of wiki link networks. Why should they give away links?

Spamming wiki sandboxes (ATTN readers: big difference here between wikis and wiki sandboxes. Be sure you understand the difference) appears to be a way to get boosted rapidly in the SERPS. Keep us posted on how well the strategy works over time and what the penalties - if any - seem to be.

ferret77 · #9 (**permalink**) 06-02-2004, 01:39 PM

Quote:

Why should they give away links?

becasue they don't care about them , to everyone outside the seo world links don't mean to much they don't care what goes in the sand box most of them are full of giberish

you can donate to them, if you feel you are taking something

actually if i think more about it , i don't think the people who run those things would appreciate 1000s of porn links in the every day

philipp · #10 (**permalink**) 06-03-2004, 04:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrett

Do wiki sandbox creators want to help sites rank higher in search engines though?

They don't care what's on their Wiki Sandbox. It's just to play around with the system to test its functionalities. Some sandboxes also get emptied daily, automatically. Theya are always full of nonsense text.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrett

They create wikis for people to play in - you're essentially working (though I know you're having lots of fun with the Nigritude Ultramarine contest - congrats on your 2nd place listing).

Thanks, and well, I'm also only playing around -- Nigritude Ultramarine is not a commercial term, though I'd be glad to pass on the iPod if I win (I will pass it on to whoever links to me).

If I would have a commercial business, I would not put backlinks in Wiki Sandboxes. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a very serious business strategy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garrett

I think here you would reiterate your point that wiki sandboxes aren't intended for human consumption. That I can't answer to - I haven't talked with any wiki creators, but I imagine if they knew the value of links we'd see the rise (and rapid fall) of wiki link networks. Why should they give away links?

Again, they do not care what's in their sandbox.
It's the only page in a Wiki where no one cares to read but machines.

The fact a Wiki owner makes his sandbox indexed by search engines shows he does not care. After all we could reverse the argument and rightfully say Wiki Sandboxes are spamming the SERPs. It should be a webmaster's responsibility to exclude a Wiki sandbox from the result pages -- which in return would shield the sandbox from any backlink-posting people, if someone objects.

Garrett · #11 (**permalink**) 06-03-2004, 12:13 PM

Thanks for the clarification, Philipp. I was too quick to compare wiki sandbox spam and guest book spam.

I agree with you that putting backlinks in a wiki sandbox is not a very serious business strategy.

rlmrdl · #12 (**permalink**) 06-03-2004, 11:50 PM

If I would have a commercial business, I would not put backlinks in Wiki Sandboxes. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a very serious business strategy.

Is completely rational. Spending valuable time horsing about in wiki sandboxes installing links that any wiki owner will have automatically deleted every few hours anyway, is not a serious strategy.

If there was any chance they would be permanent, such as in automated guestbook links back, it might have some value, but even then, there is little guarantee of the kind of permanence that a serious business needs.

Building better content, setting up bona fide relationships, or contributing something of value to another site, attached to your link, are better uses of the available resources.

BTW, this board hates Opera.

mbrubeck · #13 (**permalink**) 06-04-2004, 01:27 AM

I posted this response in Philipp's forum:

I am a member of several open-source software projects that use wikis as tools for open collaboration. The spam in our wikis hurts our development efforts in several ways.

First, it spams the RecentChanges pages, making it less useful as a change notification system. In many cases, this also spams the mailboxes and newsreaders of users who subscribe to RecentChanges notifications. We are no longer able to use the wiki as a communications tool because most of the messages are generated by SEO spam.

Second, it puts off-topic words and phrases into our wikis. This causes them to show up in completely unrelated web searches. Strangers then find our wikis thinking that they are related to other topics, and edit pages without realizing what the site's actual purpose is.

Third, in order to fight these effects, we now need to spend ridiculous amounts of time blocking or cleaning up after SEO spam.

Please, don't spam wikis. The SandBox page is there for a purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is not meant to be "a place where anyone can create backlinks."

Garrett · #14 (**permalink**) 06-14-2004, 04:59 PM

mbrubeck - thank you for sharing how Wiki Spam affects wiki owners. I hope it convinces everyone not to try this "technique."

G

Dave Hawley · #15 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 03:03 AM

Garret, most of your posts are now likley to cause grief to anyone that follows them. These post, IMO, are lowering the standard of WPW.

Why not post some quality properly researched stuff as apposed to spamming techniques?

G[dot]com · #16 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 04:11 AM

Same old story, isn´t it?

ABUSE...it is always ABUSE

What is the difference between Wiki Spam and this?

Quote:

June 14, 2004

SEO Chat Institutes Sandbox Affect for New Members
As SEO Chat's Forum continues to grow, we continue to have problems with people spamming the forum in order to increase their link popularity. SEO Chat, like many other forums, allow signature links. However, SEO Chat has a fairly attractive PageRank value, which tends to attract link seekers. A forum for SEOs by SEOs with high PR is not always a good match. Since SEO Chat's PageRank rose, link enthusiasts have come by and posted hundreds of "Thank you, great post" with links to their sites. Deleting, pruning and banning those members takes too much time. So we decided to institute some policy.

First policy was not to allow members with less then 100 posts to show their signature file. After that was set into play, we saw two things. (1) Manual signature links embedded within the body of a post. (2) People posting a hundred times in one day in order to reach the 100 post requirement. If those 100 posts were of value, no one would care but of course they were not.

So we added a second policy. Why not name it, the SEO Chat Sandbox. We require 100 posts PLUS a member has to be on board for 90 days. The 90 days are symbolic of the average time it takes for a site that has been sandboxed by Google to come out of the sandbox. I hope this works.

Posted by rustybrick at June 14, 2004 08

Taken from: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000555.html

No difference.

Daddy always say: When people don´t have values and principles, try to make them understand about honesty and respect this way: Tell them that it takes the same amount of time and energy -maybe more- doing things wrong or deceptively than achieving them decently and doing no harm.

And Philipp says:

"If I would have a commercial business, I would not put backlinks in Wiki Sandboxes. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a very serious business strategy." -

Maybe we should have to adopt this way of looking at decency in terms of efficiency to convince people to do good...

G[dot]com · #17 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 04:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dave Hawley

Garret, most of your posts are now likley to cause grief to anyone that follows them. These post, IMO, are lowering the standard of WPW.

Why not post some quality properly researched stuff as apposed to spamming techniques?

Let me see...this thread is called Search Engine insider REPORTS. Which means that some person or group will make reports here about a certain subject. Those people are called "Reporters".

So here we have one Reporter, Garrett, and one main subject, Search Engines.

My beloved Webster´s Dictionary (i still like the paper edition) says:

Reporter: a person who gathers information and writes reports for publication in a newspaper, magazine, etc.

If Wiki or Forum Spam is what is going on in the search engine world Garrett make the research and HAS to report it.

You can´t blame or criticize CNN because of the war in Middle East. They just report it. And if you want to learn, you watch Discovery or The History Channel. :o)

Likewise, other threads in this same forum function specifically to give advise on how to do good SEO and decent SEO. This is not the place....I think.

G

Dave Hawley · #18 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 06:23 AM

Quote:

You can´t blame or criticize CNN because of the war in Middle East. They just report it. And if you want to learn, you watch Discovery or The History Channel. :o)

There is resposible reporting and non-resposible reporting. If Garret just reports how to hack into your web site, or how to crash your server etc I bet you would see this differently.

Garret is not doing himself or WPW any favors with this type of "reporting". See here also;
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...=114815#114815

G[dot]com · #19 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 10:46 AM

Quote:

There is resposible reporting and non-resposible reporting. If Garret just reports how to hack into your web site, or how to crash your server etc I bet you would see this differently.

Again...he who reports doesn´t report *how* to do things. He does not teach.

And thinking that it could bother me Garrett´s performance just if it was *me* the one touched and not another person...well certainly you don´t know me at all.

Hello, my name is Gisela. And I am not that way :o)

Nevermind.

Good evening in Australia, Dave!

G

kokopoko · #20 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rlmrdl

Is completely rational. Spending valuable time horsing about in wiki sandboxes installing links that any wiki owner will have automatically deleted every few hours anyway, is not a serious strategy.

After reading Philipp's blog I spammed a few and did notice the links got deleted within minutes. But, days later I noticed Google found my spam links not in the current Wiki sandbox state but in the list of revised sandbox revisions that each sandbox seems to keep. All were PR4 and above. So perhaps the Wiki sandbox links can be permanent.

Dave Hawley · #21 (**permalink**) 06-15-2004, 10:24 PM

Quote:

Again...he who reports doesn´t report *how* to do things. He does not teach

Oh yes he is. While it may not be worded as a 'how-to-manual' is still tells "how".

Real reporters do have rules, laws, guidelines and moral abligation you know. This is when you watch CNN news on the terrible situtaion in Iraq you are NOT shown all the blood, gore and pictures that could compromise.

I'm sorry G[dot]com, but reporting is not a automatic right to report on anything in anyway.

Here is a hypothetical

Lot's of expert SEO have worked out how to suck PR from the certain pages of other sites into their own. It doesn't work on all sites and all pages, just some. As yet we have no idea why only some.

In one case a SEO (domain here) linked to <One of YOUR domain pages here> and managed to steal all the PR for that page. It would seem this site is one that can have it's PR stolen.

</hypothetical>

Now, not a "how to", but totally irresposible.

If Garret's report was resposible, mbrubeck would not be compelled to counter and try to undo the contributing damage Garrets "report" has done. Garret himself even states "this particular method of building back links seems to take undue license with other people's projects". Please don't try and tell me that by stating that he absolves himself in any way.

IMO, the "report" is no more than irresponsible gossip and has the potential to really hurt a business.