Guest Books

Spamming

[paternosterprime]

Over the past two days I had someone post no less than fifty message to my guest book which included links to various sites. I googled the email address and found over two hundred other guest books this person had signed . . . before Google's last crawl! Anyone ever experience this? Has anyone named this evil way of getting an improved pagerank through abusive linking? Any suggestions how to outwit it?

[rjohara]

You named it yourself: it's called "guestbook spamming". If you search for that term you'll find a lot written about it. A number of major search engines even introduced a new HTML anchor attribute, rel="nofollow", to combat it. If you search for "nofollow" you'll find lots too.

[larryhatch]

Way way back when I was way wau naive, I spammed a few guestbooks just to get my
site seen at all. It was new, and listed in the outback if at all.
It never did a bit of good for all I can tell.

Finally, word of mouth got me some links and attention,
and things have slowly improved since then.

If you have the URL of the guestbook-spammer, you might try an experiment:
Google up the likeliest keyword(s) for the BG-spam site, but without mentioning it by name.
See how many pages out in the boondocks the site/pages rank in the SERPs. -Larry

[paternosterprime]

I don't even have to do it . . . I got a ton of different sites listed in my own guest book, and my googling of the email address showed business. I'm thinking it's a robot. I'm actually kind of touched, because at least a robot found my site! That's progress, right?