Forum Moderators: mack
it is used in by search engines to describe sites they don't like or that they feel breaks their rules.
How is it done? There are a million ways to do search engine spam, how much or little they work are debatable.
some examples would be keyword stuffing or hidden text. These don't really work anymore but you still see it a lot. Though I am sure there are still sites out there that may say they get advantages from it.
What is done about it? Well, if the engines catch you they will probably kick you out of their index. It is the catching that is quite difficult. ;)
any terms you are unfamiliar with should be in our Glossary [webmasterworld.com]
and there is no such thing as a silly question.
this search [google.com] might be of use as well
How is it done
A spammer gets your e-mail address. There are dozens of ways to harvest addresses; some are:
1) web harvesting - the spammer crawls the www looking for addresses in guest books, Usenet posts, and websites
2) hacking - a spammer hacks into a database to steal mailing lists
3) brute force verification - the spammer sends tiny messages to every permutation of letters and numbers @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com... then discards those that return a "your message cannot be sent" reply
Then the spammer sends mail. Lots of mail.
Usually the spammer will take some precautions to protect his/her identity, by using proxies, changing headers, hacked anonymous hosts to serve up images. If your computer is infected with a trojan, a spammer might use your computer to send his spam, and you would never know.
Most spam is sent as affiliate marketing - the spammer gets a commission when you buy online pharmaceuticals or debt consolidation services. The online equivalent of telemarketing.
Some spam is far more unethical - virus spreading worms and phishing scams that try to trick you into divulging personal information like credit card #s and banking passwords.
and what gets done about it?
1) Unsolicited. The recipient didn't ask / give permission to be sent it.
2) Bulk. Sent to a lot of different people.
So, for example, a bulk email from a service where users have signed up and want to receive the content wouldn't be considered spam (because it's not unsolicited), and a single email sent to a sales prospect wouldn't be considered spam (because it's not bulk).
Hence 'UBE', Unsolicited Bulk Email.
hth, a.
Email: Unsolicited bulk email
Search Engines: Websites that offer nothing of value and are set up usually just so that visitors will click the ads on them, making money for the website owners.
Guest Books: Signing a guest book on a website for the sole purpose of advertising some other site.
Log Files: Faking requests for pages on a website so the faking site shows up in the legitimate site's access logs. If those logs happen to be accessible by the search engines, then this means free links back to the faking site.
By the way, another way spammers get email addresses is from spyware that reads your address book from your email client and sends that data back to the spammer. I get spam to several addresses that I've used only for mailing other people, and I don't think those other people sold me out, I think their computers were just compromised.
