Oh, those wily Viagra spammers!
Their no-holds-barred marketing campaigns have provided cheap pills and thrills for the young and old who most desperately need some. But they have also managed to forever associate Pfizer’s breakthrough drug brand with spam.
A few months back, rogue Viagra dealers were penetrating top of the SERP’s by parasite hosting on .edu sites. They would hack a last-updated-in-’97 Native American languages forum, bribe a library assistant with a month’s salary, or offer a frathouse a truckload of magic blue pills in order to get their hands on a linkjuice-engorged .edu page that they could redirect to their “pharmacy” site.
Google seems to have cleaned most of the .edu parasite pages out of the top Viagra rankings, so they’ve moved on to deeper strongholds.
Popular social media sites like Digg and Reddit host a constant stream of fresh content and traffic, so they enjoy enviably high PageRank.
Most of the spamming on these sites is people submitting commercial stories and trying to make them popular in hopes of a brief burst of traffic and some backlinks.
The lowest rung of social media spammer is the newbie who submits blatantly commercial headlines without knowing any better. For their effort, they get a worthless link and they might even get a click or two for before the story gets voted out.
The slightly more sophisticated spammer tries to actually get votes and make their “story” popular:
The user Katbo (according to his profile has zero Diggs, zero friends, two submission and two made popular!) most likely got his press release to the home page by purchasing random Diggs from a blackhat pay-for-votes service, orchestrating sock-puppet accounts, or by soliciting friends to vote via e-mail.
Recently I came across a more effective, outside-the-box approach of spamming by using Digg and Reddit for parasite hosting. Here’s from the page one SERP at Google for “buy Viagra”:
By creating a keyword targeted page or profile on a strong, legitimate social media domain and pointing several hundred spammy backlinks at it, they were able to pump their link up to the top of Google for an uber-competitive query.
Schwing! Some impressive (but short term) performance enhancement.
