Anyone who has a computer and an internet connection will be familiar with the modern day definition of spam. Spam is often used to describe the “dubious content” that frequently masquerades itself as legitimate emails and web pages in order to get read. It seems that the internet and spam go hand in hand which frustrates internet users and costs business billions in lost productivity every year.
Email harvesters crawl the web looking for email addresses to bombard us with Viagra ads, scrappers steal our best content and article spinning software rephrase and paraphrase it before plagiarists upload it to the web and proudly call it their own. The good news is that email clients are getting better at spotting rogue emails, although some still gets through, and search engines are getting better at referring us to relevant high quality web pages, but things could still be better.
Article Spinning and Search Engine Spam
Spam is a moving target as far as search engines are concerned; as algorithms continue to evolve they become more adept at spotting the most common types of spam. Keyword stuffing, invisible text and the old CSS indent trick are all techniques that can be detected programmatically. So what’s a spammer to do now that so many doors have been closed? How does he game search engines in order to promote his particular bag of dubious content?
One recent technique is to employ article spinning software to steal and plagiarize the hard work of others. Article spinning works by taking an existing article and rewording and rephrasing phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Software developers claim their spinners are capable of producing unique content, however what’s really produced its merely paraphrased low quality content that no one would want to read.
And so the game of cat and mouse continues between search engine and spammer. It won’t take long for search engines to come up with a way to combat this latest variant of spam. Unavoidably, this means that a new form of spam is lurking just around the corner and coming your way soon!