Interview with a link spammer

If you’ve ever wondered what the hell anyone has to gain by spamming your blog, or even felt it was something to take personally, here’s a great article on the topic from The Register.

Sam - let’s call our interviewee Sam, it’s suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But “it’s not not all rock and roll and big money”, says Sam. What isn’t? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that’s what.

That’s just the first paragraph, and it goes on to explain some of the how and why, and tackle the issues of morals and law. Personally, I’m sympathetic to why these guys do what they do - the legitimate rules of the game are stacked against web entrepreneurs. We’re no longer in an age where working hard and working smart cut it, and those who have are becoming less willing to share.

They’re just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge “link farms” of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others’ ranking.

I’m torn on this issue, to be honest. I can see both sides. I unequivocally don’t think people setting up blogs deserve to be harrassed. But I can understand the spammer’s thinking. Some rules really are put in place solely to keep the have-nots in their place, and I’m all for breaking such rules - so long as no innocent bystanders get hurt.