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there are actually plenty of bots out there already:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/buy-sell-trade/419...
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.)
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.
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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…
All they'd have to do is add a captcha to the submit. Trivial to implement and it would reduce the spammers.
If he is pinning relevant pictures to themed board and simply doing it at scale, is he really abusing the site? 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...
> simply doing it at scale That's the most abusive part. As a Pinterest user I want to see what other real users are pinning. I don't want to see what 4,000 bots are pinning.
sounded very tempting at first, but since spammers are already releasing tools to do automated spamming, they might have realized that their methods wont work forever (otherwise they would be making an irrational decision, since they could make much more money by using them themselves). there are actually plenty of bots out there already: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/buy-sell-trade/419... http://pinblast…
> 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?
I think he is using URL shorteners or custom URLs that looks like a blog but are a redirect to an affiliate URL. Now they'd have to start examining the URLs in detail, which is a lot harder. Especially if he cloaks for access that looks to be coming from Pinterest themselves.
For that matter if I were tasked with posting this spam, I'd do the same...
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I don't think it generates a lot of false positives. Obviously not every amazon link with an affiliate tag is spam. 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.
Right -- you just used three separate signals together to identify a possible spammer. I'm fairly sure we're on the same page.
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Right -- you just used three separate signals together to identify a possible spammer. I'm fairly sure we're on the same page.
We aren't on the same page. You think it generates a lot of false positives. I don't.
So alright, we aren't on the same page, but you're saying exactly what I just said.
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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…
All they'd have to do is add a captcha to the submit. Trivial to implement and it would reduce the spammers.
On the other end are the users. If you ban proxies, finger their ports and ask them to solve a captcha every time they hit the submit button; you'll create some serious animosity. Stopping spam means having to invest, come up with complicated algorithms and you still might accidentally ban innocent users who will blog about this or tell their friends [1].
The real question is... does it matter that affiliate links are being posted if it needs a guide to let the everyday users notice it [2]. My niece doesn't even know what a affiliate link is and neither do most users. I mean if there's a 100% method to stop it, implement it. However, should you invest money and dev time into problems that nobody has solved to this date...
[1] http://acme.com/updates/archive/173.html [2] http://www.dailydot.com/news/how-spot-spammer-pinterest/