Instead of trying to fight forum, blog and wiki spam it finally dawned on me that I was taking the wrong approach, don't fight the Black Hat spammers, monetize them!
The basic concept is built around the black hat spammers love of spamming so the first thing you need to do is set up a bunch of fake forums, blogs and wiki's using the popular open source software that the spammers love most. The trick is NOT to install any form of spam controls whatsoever, no captcha, no Askimet, nothing that will slow the spammer down. Let the spammers go wild with your honeypot site and let them make fake profiles, create spam threads and comments, it doesn't matter because we call all this spam "content" for this purpose.
For those advanced webmasters, take a look at some automatic content creation techniques that you can use to prime the honeypot sites with hundreds of bogus threads and blog posts of gibberish. This will trick the spammers into thinking you have a popular site where there will be lots of eyeballs looking at their spam yet nothing could be further from the truth as nobody will ever see their spam. If you want to be truly creative, use the text jumble or synonym switch on each spammers post to avoid duplicate content and also avoid matching their spam footprint which could be easily detected.
Right about now you must be asking yourself:
"Why in the hell would I build a site designed to be spammed?"
The answer is simple, the spam will become your content and hopefully your honeypot sites will pick up some traffic from the search engines. Best of all, the spammers will keep hitting your site daily so you'll have fresh content and we know how the search engines just love fresh content.
Once you get this traffic from the search engine, simply redirect that traffic to the appropriate affiliate landing page based on the search keyword and VOILA! you start making sales and the free money starts rolling in with the spammers doing all the work.
So there you have a simple yet elegant solution in one neat little bundle to let spammers make you money while you screw them over wasting their time spamming your honeypot sites.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Make Money With a Black Hat Honeypot
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19 comments:
Welcome to the dark side!
Ha ha ... love it ... sounds like a slippery slope!
True Genius... most excellent. You think like a Black Hat.
Ha Ha.. nice post.
This is a fascinating idea. I am a complete novice, so this sounds ingenious to me.
Fukcin hilarious! I too happily fight of spammers and hackers and have had much fun reading your rants.
Thanks!
Priceless! Bill, you just made my day :).
Er...isn't that cloaking? The search engines may love frequent new content, but they hate cloaking.
"...... cloaking?" No, a redirect isn't an IP or UA delivery system.
IncrediBill, that is classic, thanks for the laugh
It's showing the search engines one thing and the human visitors something different. That's cloaking, pretty much by definition. :P
This Isn't Cloaking
It's cloaking if I show the search engine one thing and redirect the visitors to something different.
Cloak on!
But ... but cloaking is wrong...it's deceptive behavior. People will see your content expecting something else, i.e. under false pretenses. It's evil! And making your site visitors mad at you isn't good business sense anyway.
OK, what part of the whole post did you miss?
It was a post about using Black Hat tricks against Black Hats by building sites designed to be full of spam.
So you think visitors would be less mad seeing pages of junk spam than being redirected to topical ads?
Oh puleez, I think you missed the entire point of the post.
Bill,
you seem to assume that a spam site suddenly become acceptable just by stating it would serve a good purpose. But from Google's point of view, these honeypots do provide low quality content, not unlike scraper sites and everything else that is in violation with their Terms of Services. In other words, their presence in search results is as useless as genuine spam sites and an annoyance to those who were looking for relevant search results.
So, how is your "good guys" spam any different from "bad guys" spam to unrelated third parties? How comes that practices, you of all people condemn when black hats are using them, are suddenly legitimate if only used by you? To me that makes you virtually indistinguishable from a "bad guys" spammer, especially with your attempt at gaming the search engines to attract traffic to your honeypot and abuse their resources by indexing crap content just to satisfy your desire to become the uber anti-spam spammer with the most diverse spams to crow about.
These delusions of grandeur about being so special that people have to accept your "good guys" spam do not seem to reflect consistent ethical convictions, do they?
See, I knew you missed the point of the post.
It was intended to satirically highlight how some black hat tactics are used so blindly that you could theoretically use them against the black hats themselves in a cannibalistic fashion.
I never knew an attempt at humor made me have "delusions of grandeur".
P.S. Note that others went "HA HA" and "Thanks for the laugh" in their comments so obviously some people got that I wasn't serious.
lol. I was found a forum that was like that. It had like 9,000 threads of spam. I think the owner put it up and accidentally forget about it.
It was really funny to see.
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