post

Why Spam Swicki?

Search activity on my swicki (see right sidebar) skyrocketed all of a sudden. Here’s a partial list of searches performed yesterday:

ags publishing 1
battle realms 1
book publishers directory… 1
bourbon street 1
bourbon street new orlean… 1
brick 1
british industrial revolu… 1
brownie guides 1
brownies uk 1
bunk beds 1
buy cds 1
buy concert tickets 1
c programming 1
california bar 1
california state bar 1
camelot park 1
car audio systems 1
careers 1
cascading style sheets… 1
cd now 1
cd stores 1
cfm 1
cgi 1
chat rooms 1
chat sites 1
cheap airline tickets… 1
cheap cds 1
cheap dvd 1
cheap ink cartridges 1
cheap tires 1
civil war battles 1
civil war information… 1
clock kits 1
cnn 1
cnn interactive 1
cnn world news 1
comp cams 1
computer deals 1
computer hardware 1
computer prices 1
computer sales 1
computers 1
concert tickets 1
concert tickets ticketmas… 1
consumer product reviews… 1
consumer reviews 1
corel draw

There are pages and pages of this crap, it’s clearly an automated “search attack”.  Once again I prove how clueless I am about the business of spamming, but I really don’t see who and how benefits from such automated searches …  Swicki team?  Anyone? 

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Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    This is very unusual behavior that we do not see very often. The fact that the moderator needs to approve any new terms to the buzzcloud no one but the moderator will see this so it does not affect the swicki at all. Your analysis is correct that this sort of behavior has no benefit to the spammer so that is why it doesn’t happen very often. We know spammers are a determined lot and will try anything now and then…please let us know if it happens again and thanks for your comments. -Swicki Team

  2. Anonymous says

    That happened a couple of times to me too and both times I traced it down it turned out being a (new, not well-known) site that was collecting sites about… well everything. It was if they were attempting to create their own database for a search engine.

    Along those lines, I manually collect my sites from TAGS that I add to my del.icio.us account everyday and that is going to be my data source for Rolly-O or some other Roll You Own search engine.

    fyi: I only got here just now because I was looking at an old vanity search of sites I had been at in the past, i.e. not spam related lol. Peace.

  3. I wonder if it could be an attempt to disable or at least hinder the performance of swicki. I know this may sound like conspiracy theory, but: seeing all those keywords I first deleted them – then realized this would block them forever, and found quite a few “useful” ones in the list, so I unblocked them – this is pretty much the scheme I’ve talked about re. trackback spam.

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