41–50 of 118 posts
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.
Frankly this sounds like what Pinterest should be doing for revenue. Isn't basically what promoted tweets are for Twitter?
Promoted tweets are a fucking scourge, at least so far. I've seen two - both times for something totally irrelevant to me. (What the hell is the Shell Houston 2012 Open? I have zero idea, and less than zero interest.)
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It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.
Most of the experienced spammers fake the referrer. They'll have a scrub site setup which will appear as any blog. The spammer will spam links to the blog page (often using a url shortener); however the link will contain a id. If you visit the page with the id it will selectively redirect traffic to their amazon affiliate link, without the id link it will appear as a normal blogpost. Amazon will think the traffic com…
So-called "skimming" of links does not strike me as being terribly wrong (or different from what Pinterest does itself), but the practice likely still undercuts their bizmodel because they don't skim links that already have affiliate ids attached to them.
Does anyone know if Steve's actions are legal under United States law?
Does anyone know if Steve's actions are legal under United States law?
I don't think it violates any specific law, but I'm guessing that a prosecutor could come up with some charges if the website hired good enough lawyers. Charges similar to the ones you see for denial of service or computer fraud.
> we found tons of bots that traced to your Amazon affiliate account This suggest a trivial fix for the problem on Pinterest's side, doesn't it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.
Amazon Associates allows you to create unlimited, unique affiliate IDs, tied to one AA account.