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A Pinterest spammer tells all

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Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#81

Post by AJ007 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #4

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.

Spammers were doing that 6+ years ago. It worked. It still does.

Content farm = spamming to make money off of adsense and display advertising. What you are referring to would be more accurately termed a gateway page, for which the sole purpose is to direct a user off to an affiliate link or another site.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#82

Post by AJ007 »

chrisohara wrote: post #43
codexon wrote: post #6

An easy way to find Pinterest spammers. http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/ I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.

How are they not picking it up as spam? The same affiliate link from multiple accounts... The description also looks like a snippet of one the product reviews on Amazon

They aren't picking it up as spam because they aren't trying to stop spam. They will soon, and it will become very difficult to make much smaller amounts of money. Or, if they don't, they will end up in a place where pinterest is the Myspace of pinboards.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#83

Post by MichaelApproved »

buro9 wrote: post #14
joshuahedlund wrote: post #11

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…

I'm building one of these at the moment. 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 determi…

2) What if I build a redirect engine that doesn't redirect to an affiliate page at first and then turn on the redirect after your engine completes the permalink check? For example, if you do the permalink check when the story is published, I would have my engine wait 5 minutes or so before changing the destination of the URL to my affiliate page.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#84

Post by MichaelApproved »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #56
jcfrei wrote: post #51

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…

Pinblaster, you have got to be f * kidding me.

Please elaborate.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#85

Post by boyter »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #54
SpiderX wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they'd have to do is add a captcha to the submit. Trivial to implement and it would reduce the spammers.

CAPTHCA is trivial to implement, but is terrible for usability.

And in many cases trivial to circumvent http://www.wausita.com/captcha/

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#86

Post by nmridul »

SpiderX wrote: post #45
Father wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

manual captcha breaking services are available for as low as $10 for 1000 captcha breaks. Most of the bots use them, just pass the captcha image to the service and there is someone at the other end who would just enter the characters and all of these happens within seconds. search deathbycaptcha etc.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#87

Post by nmridul »

codexon wrote: post #75
coderdude wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't, yet when you go to explain how it could be used you include two other signals (came from Twitter, posts many items more than once) in order to make it work. I had originally said "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." So alright, we aren't on the same page, but you're saying exactly what I just said.

No single heuristic is perfect. How about you tell us your 1 flawless method? Just because I used 2 different signals to prove to you that the method doesn't generate a lot of false positives, doesn't mean that looking at amazon links is a bad method. If I was at Pinterest, I would slap a captcha on all Amazon links with affiliates until I had time for a fancier solution, and it would probably get rid of 99% of the s…

Breaking captcha is easier. Deathbycaptcha, decaptcher - Two of the services that provide clean APIs for the bots and breaks the captchas for you. And on the other end there are even human sitting and cracking the captchas. It doesn't cost much and for the $2k he earns per day, these captcha breaking service is just drops in the ocean.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#88

Post by buro9 »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #83
buro9 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building one of these at the moment. 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 determi…

2) What if I build a redirect engine that doesn't redirect to an affiliate page at first and then turn on the redirect after your engine completes the permalink check? For example, if you do the permalink check when the story is published, I would have my engine wait 5 minutes or so before changing the destination of the URL to my affiliate page.

For my own work I plan to keep a store of ALL user submitted links.

I plan to iterate over it and do sane things with it: * Is it an embedded image and is Chrome reporting the domain as malware? = Convert to link instead of image * If it a link that was only transiently available? = indicate that it is no longer available and suggest searching instead

My aim is to self-heal user submitted content that links elsewhere, as much as it is to monetise that content where it's possible to.

I plan to visit links on a schedule and react as necessary. I hadn't really figured in affiliate spammers, but that would just be part of the self-healing now... detect change in destination and re-run the bit that strips affiliate codes.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#90

Post by nullflux »

DanBC wrote: post #39
bproper wrote: post #19

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.

Everyone talks about authenticity in social media (that somebody wants to see "real" content from "real" people) which really makes sense because it is the most human thing. But what if the bots pass a Turing test and deliver relevant content with said links? Does it not become spam anymore? That's the weird part. All of the spam I get in my email I don't want because it is completely irrelevant. Same goes for ads on nearly every site. That's why it's spam: I don't want it, it's being forced on me, and is completely irrelevant to my productivity. But if some bot dug up something cool, isn't that just what gets defined these days as "targeted advertising"?

The utilitarian argument here invalidates this premise of the pins needing to be human, which is what is interesting. If you are getting utility out of it and you didn't know it was a bot, you are actually still better off.

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