Sunday, July 17, 2005

Blog Spam Tricks & Secrets Revealed

Blog Spam Tricks Uncovered

It's Sunday and we just got home from having lunch with a great couple. On the way home both of our girls fell asleep so Shannon and I had time to get a couple things done around the house.

To Shannon that involves anything that doesn't make a lot of noise like picking up toys, laundry, sweeping, etc... For me it usually means catching up on reading blogs or something else online that doesn't involve work. Well today Shannon was doing her thing and I was doing mine. I went to Shannon's blog and after I got caught up on the goings on in my own house [by reading her blog] I decided to try the blogger "Next Blog" link at the top of her blog. So I clicked on it and found all sorts of interesting blogs. Many were in foreign languages, some were about cooking, others about legal advice, others about teen angst. But while I was surfing from blog to blog using the blogger bar found at the top of all these blogs I noticed something interesting.

I noticed that some of these blogs didn't have the blogger bar at the top of them. Now the way that bar works is like this... If you want to get traffic from other blogs hosted at blogspot [aka blogger.com blogs] then you can leave the blogger navigation bar at the top of your blog template and it will include your blog in the blogspot web ring. I'm sure any blogger employee reading this would cringe if they heard me call their blogger bar a web ring but for all intents and purposes, that's what it is. So if you have the blogger navbar on your site then your site is included in the pile of blogs that can be found via the "Next Blog >>" blogs. It's basically a way to get some traffic to your blog without you actively seeking it. The amount of traffic you get isn't going to be very much but you're not having to spend any money or do anything that requires effort on your own part so a lot of folks leave the navbar on their blogspot blogs.

Well, spammers have found a way to use this, like everything else online, to make money. Here is what and how they do it as well as a few blogs I've run across that exhibit this behaviour.

Blogspot Spam Trick Techniques
1. These blog spammers set up a blog that talks about whatever product it is they're trying to push. The usual suspects are online casinos, online porn, free software, mortgage quotes, asbestos / mesothelioma attorneys, anyway you get the picture.
2. They either automatically submit posts to their blogs using a custom built program that takes content off of other sites on the same subject and randomly generates posts about them on a daily [often times much more frequent basis.
3. They have affiliate links to the product they're trying to push all over their site and usually have a lot of images as well since they always attract the eye to them, more so than just plain text posts do.

So the first 3 steps don't have anything to do with blogger navigation bar, they merely tell you how these spam blogs are set up. Here's how these blog spammers get free traffic and hosting from Blogger to their blogs.

They use the age old search engine optimization tactic called cloaking. Cloaking is a technique in which you detect a search engine spider when it comes to your site. When the spider comes to your site you tell it what it wants to hear. In this case that would mean the blog spammers show the blogger navbar to the googlebot but not to a visitor to their site. However that's not possible since blogger is hosting the blog and the user cannot add any server side user agent detection in order to know when a search engine spider is on the site. Even if they could, Google has direct access to the contents of each individual blog since they store the data on their own database. Yet you can see live examples of blogs not showing the blogger navigation bar. So this begs the question...

How Are Blogspot Blogs Cloaking?
It's much more simple that you would even think. Since the blogs are using css for their layouts and positioning and each blogger can customize their own template, the cloaking is a piece of cake.

xHere are some of the cloaking techniques I've seen thus far.
1. Under the blogger navbar spammers will put the following css to the navbar is invisible to the blog's visitors.

style type="text/css"
!--
   #b-navbar{display:none;}
   #b-logo{display:none;}
   #b-search{display:none;}
   #b-more{display:none;}
   #b-getorpost{display:none;}
//--
/style

This basicaly calls out each of the styles blogger defined in the navbar css and hides them from the end user. So they keep the navbar code on their blogs but it's just not visible to the end user.

This gambling blog does that quite well...
http://internet-online-casino.blogspot.com/

This will be an easy fix for Google since all they have to do is look at the stored blog template and see if the blogger navbar styles have been redefined in the template in a place other than they normally defined them. They can also just see if any of those b-navbar styles have display:none values associated with them.

2. Splash page scam utilizing javascript. This technique uses javascript to load a splash screen disabling you from entering the blogspot blog unless you do as it says, click here to enter. The javascript is loaded above any of the html tags in the blogger template and clicking on the splashpage image will take you to a site you probably don't want to visit. The blog I found utilizing this technique was http://coolstuffofftheweb.blogspot.com/ and clicking on the splash screen would take you to site you shouldn't see.

They use a script provided by blogring.net that enables a user to create a splash page for their blog but this essentially disbles the ability for you to see the blogger navbar upon entrance into a site using the script. Here's the script...

!--Blogring.net Splash Screen Begin --
Click To Enter
div id=first onClick="showSite()"
IMG SRC="http://www.watchmeopenthehelloutofthisdoor.com/Fun/Lesbian_Dreaming.25.jpg" ALIGN="CENTER"

div id=second
style
#second {display:none}
#first {display:block}
/style
!-- Blogring.net Splash Screen End -- 
!--Blogring.net Splash Screen Begin --
script
function showSite()
{
if (document.all)
{
document.all['first'].style.display='none';
document.all['second'].style.display='block';
}

spammy script here - go to site to view for 
yourself if you really want to look at it.

/script
!-- Blogring.net Splash Screen End --

Blogspam Wrapup Notes
The highest number of blogs I found displaying the blogger navbar properly without apparent spam manipulation was 36. However, it was more like one spam site for every 5 - 6 Next Blog links I clicked on. When I clicked on no. 37 I was greeted with this url http://pandoras-box-starlog.blogspot.com/, a site displaying 4 huge blogs of Google AdSense ads and 3 huge blogs displaying affiliate links from AllPosters.com. This site appeared to be using traditional cloaking as well as blogspot spam techniques to accomplish this. Wow, what a waste of brain processing power just to make a few bucks and waste some innocent web surfer's time.

That site used <noembed> tags around the blogger navigation bar plus it hosted images from http://www.blogblog.com to cover up the navbar and added two extra lines of style with the following attributes...

width:100%; height:1px; position:relative; 
overflow:hidden; visibility:show;  font-size:100%; 
top:0px; margin:0 0 0; padding:0 0 0px; 
background:#EEFBFA;"

I'm showing you all of this just so you can see how something like a blogger navigation bar, intended to help you find more blogs in the blogspot network, has been used for illegitimate purposes. Yes I know that navbar also helps with blogger's branding and other things but that's not my point. Spammers will always exploit the latest technology, because just like law, there are always loopholes. I hope you found this piece interesting.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 03:18 PM
Permanent Link: Blog Spam Tricks & Secrets Revealed | Comments (0)