New Type of Spammer

Company claims they can bump bad reviews off the first page of SERPS

[maximillianos]

I've recently discovered a new breed of spammer hounding my site. They are a company called <snip> They sell their services to companies looking to clean their image up on the web. They claim to be able to knock any bad reviews of a company off the first page of results. They try to do this by spamming sites with praise and compliments for the companies. They also try when possible to throw a link in there as an added bonus.

I've been watching them on my site for the last few weeks and simply banning them as I find them. They are not very smart (yet) as they keep trying to post the same comments for the same companies (their small list of clients I presume). They also don't cover their tracks very well, but I'm guessing they will get smarter. They've already started creating multiple id's (my system is an e-mail based registration, so robots can't register).

Just a warning to those who moderate forums. I'm guessing we'll be seeing a lot more spam from these guys.

Cheers!

[edited by: engine at 4:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]
[edit reason] specifics [/edit]

[rogerd]

Who would be dumb enough to hire a company that performs crude forum spamming to improve their image? Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire...

I can't imagine these guys are going to last very long.

I've consulted on situations where negative publicity about a company was very highly ranked, and creating some random forum posts would in no way outrank the negative content.

[AjiNIMC]

I have not encounter it yet I am assosiated with close to a dozen one.