This is a new project I’ve been gathering data on for over a year, and I’m going to launch it to the public for the first time. It’s called F.S. (or Form Spammer) Base, and it is an automated collection of all the form comment spam that I have received through contact forms over the past several months, based on a very simple, but surprisingly effective “algorithm” that I developed. As far as I know, there is only one other person who has even had this idea, and I’m not even sure if he has a site for the data…if he has, I haven’t seen it.

Please note that this database contains only form comments that I have received, and does not pertain to email, web forum, or other types of spam…yet (never say never, though).

I have over 2400 attempts logged in the database at the present time, and more are constantly added. As you can see, there are quite a few beauties in there.

I have a few questions I’d like to ask anyone still reading this blog in order to improve upon the concept:

1) What format, if any, would you like me to present this data in (besides the obvious HTML formatting already used) in order to import it into your own spam databases?

2) Is there a microformat that presently exists for this? (I could look, but it might save me some time if someone already knows). If not, I can create my own, no big deal.

3) My host, Sectorlink, has given me permission to use this data and present it openly as long as I don’t present any pornographic image data or directly link to any sites themselves, since the intent isn’t to openly encourage illicit behavior but rather to fight spam. I don’t think this is an issue, since I’m using Server.HTMLEncode on the spam attempt itself to make sure it shows up as code and not the output, but does anyone see anything that would be obviously pornographic? I’m not talking the text itself, but obvious links to porn sites and lewd images.

4) Does anyone see any false positives?

Any other thoughts would be appreciated.

Yes, I’m back…well, sort of. Did ya miss me? Probably not, and that’s okay. Most of you end up here as the result of a search query anyway, so my absence really didn’t have a negative impact of significance on this blog at all. Yeah, there are a few of you who read regularly, but most of you are drive-byers…and I’m cool with that.

Anyway, I’m going to make some changes to the content of this blog. I’m pretty well going to focus on three major things, and as a result, posts to this blog won’t be daily as they were before…they’ll be whenever the content arises naturally and I have the time:
Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few people who are seemingly paying way too much attention to this site and my activities online (or lack thereof) as of late. For the life of me, I don’t know why…and I don’t know why people pay attention to a blog that hasn’t been posted to in over 3 months. But hey…whoever said it had to make sense, right?

So, for those of you who want to know, this will be the official “update” post. I don’t know when I’ll be willing and able to post again…so this will once again be the last post in a while.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who wish to join the I-Follow Movement and have WordPress blogs on your own domains, good news is forthcoming; the rel=”nofollow” attribute can easily be removed without the need for additional plugins or software. In fact, it only takes about 5 minutes and one line of code!

Spam Warning

Removing the rel=’external nofollow’ attribute can result in increased spam attempts and, in order to protect yourself, I recommend signing up with a WordPress.com Account, even though your blog resides on your own domain; by doing so, you will acquire the WordPress API key required to activate the Akismet plugin. So please do this first.

What You Will Need

1. A text editor; ideally, one that will allow you to go to a particular line number in your code. Notepad++ has this functionality, and it’s a free editor.
2. About 5 minutes’ worth of time.

Have you taken care of both of your needs? Great. Let’s go!

Read the rest of this entry »

I promised that I’d explain more about why I came up with the new layout and a couple of the new features, so here goes:

Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my daily ritual, I frequent various webmaster discussion boards, forums and blogs. One of the hot topics as of late has been the disclosure of Internet advertising to search engines (i.e. Google), with the assumption that said disclosure will lead to the discounting of advertiser links as a potential ranking factor. Opinion on this subject can easily be described as “polarized”; people either seem to be completely for the idea or against the idea, and there is absolutely no middle ground.

One of the naysayers’ primary arguments is that disclosure of advertiser links does nothing whatsoever to help the users and is done for search engines only, which flies in the face of what search engines want us as web designers to do; build for search engines and not for users. However, there is at least a partial solution to this perceived problem that is easy to implement using CSS and a little ingenuity. I call it Full Link Disclosure.

Read the rest of this entry »

I keep seeing variants of this question asked in various webmaster and SEO discussion boards, forums, etc. There seems to be a great deal of debate as to whether link exchanges are useful; which links generate the most traffic; the importance of PageRank; and various other topics.

With this in mind, I have prepared a simple diagram which should clearly outline the three major link types (organic, requested one-way link, and link exchange) and the value of those links.

For those of you who notice my lack of mentioning of the term “SEO” and think it’s because I didn’t remember, I did factor it in. SEO is a traffic subset, and to some extent the SEO impact of the link types measured is factored into this diagram (particularly link exchange). But SEO isn’t the only method of traffic acquisition (BLASPHEMY!), and I have prepared this diagram to reflect this.

This is intended as a general guideline only; there are some requested links that will outperform organic links, and some mutual link exchanges (i.e. the non-SEO link exchanges) can be beneficial for both sides. For the most part, however, organic links will generally outperform the other two.

Pass it on!

Yesterday, Google engineer and accidental PR (as in Public Relations) man extraordinaire Matt Cutts announced on his blog that Google is looking for examples of paid links. The only thing that Matt has mentioned is that Google is looking for as much feedback as possible as far as paid links are concerned to do some testing of new techniques.

That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!

For those of you who wish to report a link that you know is an advertiser link, you may do so using their spam report form, and use the word “paidlinks” in the subject (no, this doesn’t mean that paid links are spam…it’s just Google using a form for two purposes. Paid links do not equal spam in and of themselves, lest anyone be confused by it…but more on that later. I promise.)

Of course, the not-so-silent minority have spoken up in spades as they always do whenever Google even suggests that they’re going to do something that will shake up the results. To be quite frank, I find some of the kneejerk reaction quite amusing, and I’ll share some of my favourites:

Read the rest of this entry »

I discovered, quite by accident, that I was tagged by Connie over at Spam Whackers; for those who want to learn how to learn about some of the biggest spamhounds in the web design business as well as some other neat SEO tricks, Connie and Irina Ponomareva have got a lot of simple, easy-to-read information on the Spam Whackers blog.

I was actually going to mention it as a Cool Site tomorrow, but the tagging jumped my shark a bit. But Carlito says dass cool, and Connie’s an honest and well-intentioned man. So let’s do the damn thing!

Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you who regularly read this blog have seen, I have created some additional posts on it with some seemingly random topics, ranging from Raptors playoff tickets to places to purchase used automatic pinsetters to people who want to know where Chuck Swirsky’s blog is.

The selection of these topics and posts was anything but random; I put these posts in place to answer questions and provide information that related to the phrases that people were using to find my site on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

If you’d like to do the same thing, the good news is that you can! If you own a well-built site with decent navigation and good content, you can! It’s one of the easiest things any webmaster can do, and doesn’t rely on any spammy techniques or tricks that could get a site banned from a search engine. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of this method is that you’re optimizing for users first and using the search engines to do it!

Read the rest of this entry »