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(It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required)
Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks are pretty innocuous, if not slightly positive.
There are multiple angles to this story, and each has a compelling narrative. Social sites are not just games or freebies. They exist based on the premise that they can use human nature against itself in order to create free content from users to be consumed by other users. At the end of this road we have Facebook, where they spend tens of millions of dollars to program users to create and consume like you'd program…
The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.
The spammer in the article makes two thousand dollars a day from his army of spambots. Even if he started running two thousand bots on monday, he'd be pulling a profit by tuesday.
Will Skimlinks (or someone similar) offer a reverse-affiliate service that strips affiliate IDs from links on your site instead of adding them? Does this already exist? (It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required) Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks…
It's to process URLs, and it's just a part of what I need, but knowing that others might like such a thing means I'll see if I can open it up afterwards.
I'm looking to achieve this by two methods:
1) If the link contains the ID of the end page (i.e. ASIN for Amazon), then reconstruct the URL of the end page.
2) For places in which #1 fails, follow the link and seek to determine whether a permalink or canonical URL exists at the end page.
Ironically I seek to strip affiliate codes in order to add my own in my given use case... but I'm using golang and am trying to structure it all in a flow based way in which stripping and adding codes are just separate steps.
So it doesn't seem to me to be too hard to then expose each side as a service by itself.
What exactly is outrageous about a community service like Pinterest or a forum using Skimlinks?
What exactly is outrageous about a community service like Pinterest or a forum using Skimlinks?
As Google is killing more and more content farms, it makes sense spammers are moving towards sites that have tons of authority, and spamming there. Can't get "buy car insurance" to rank for your spamblog? No problem, create a fake question in Yahoo Answers with the keywords in your title, and a fake answer with your affiliate link. Repeat in Pinterest, Amazon Askville, Quora, etc.
An easy way to find Pinterest spammers. http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/ I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.
It's also an easy way to generate a lot of false positives. To be a spammer does not mean to take advantage of affiliate revenue. I would say this method would be too sloppy to use by itself. It would need to be a small part of a larger set of signals. Edit: DanielBMarkham's comment does a better job of conveying why this would be a bad approach.
Take a look at how many of the accounts there solely spam affiliate links from Amazon, are from a Twitter account, and repeatedly post the same items.
e.g: pictures of cakes on a recipe board about desserts that link back to a cookbook and he gets 4 cents per click through...