Real Web 2.0: Battling Web spam, Part 2

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"Community policing

"The most effective way to combat Web spam is through community action. Spam is a mass attack, and it cries out for a mass response. If a community can work together to uncover behavioral and content patterns of the spammers, it can share these patterns to reduce the effectiveness of robots. The community is especially useful in combating other variations on spam to which the workflow approaches discussed in the previous article are not applicable. First, I'll take a moment to describe linkback spam.

"Linkback spam
Weblogs and other Web articles are about sharing insights and discoveries. Sometimes, inspired by an entry, people leave comments directly on the Weblog. Sometimes they reference the entry in their own entries or articles, and a linkback is a technical formalism for notifying another site when you've linked to it. It's a network signal, a "ping" that asserts a relationship between one entry and another and helps readers find related content. But, linkbacks also open up opportunities for spammers to abuse Weblogs, sending what are called "spings" (short for "spam pings"). There are three general types of linkback, and these all have their spam-related concerns."

Complete Story

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