Archived posts from the 'Spam' Category

Dealing with spamming content thieves / plagiarists (oylinki.com)

Dealing with plagiaristsWhen it comes to crap like plagiarism you shouldn’t consider me a gentleman.

If assclowns like Veronica Domb steal my content and publish it along with likewise stolen comments on their blatantly spamming site oylinki.com, I’m somewhat upset.

Then when I leave a polite note asking the thief Veronica Domb from EmeryVille to remove my stuff asap, see my comment marked as “in moderation”, but neither my content gets removed nor my comment is published within 24 hours, I stay annoyed.

When I’m annoyed, I write blog posts like this one. I’m sure it will rank high enough for [Veronica Domb] when the assclown’s banker or taxman searches for her name. I’m sure it’ll be visible on any SERP that any other (potential) business partner submits at a major search engine.

Content Thieves Veronica Domb et al, P.O.BOX 99800, EmeryVille, 94662, CA are blatant spammers

Hey, outing content thieves is way more fun than filing boring DMCA complaints, and way more effective. Plagiarists do ego searches too, and from now on Veronica Domb from EmeryVille will find the footsteps of her criminal activities on the Web with each and every ego search. Isn’t that nice?

Not. Of course Veronica Domb is a pseudonym of Slade Kitchens, Jamil Akhtar, … However, some plagiarists and scam artists aren’t smart enough to hide their identity, so watch out.

Maybe I’ve done some companies a little favor, because they certainly don’t need to sent out money sneakily “earned” with Web spam and criminal activities that violate the TOS of most affiliate programs.

AdBrite will love to cancel the account for these affiliate links:
http://ads.adbrite.com/mb/text_group.php?sid=448245&br=1 &dk=736d616c6c20627573696e6573735f355f315f776562
http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?opid=448245&afsid=1

Google’s webspam team as well as other search engines will most likely delist oylinki.com that comes with 100% stolen text and links and faked whois info as well.

Spamcop and alike will happily blacklist oylinki.com (IP: 66.199.174.80 , cwh2.canadianwebhosting.com) because the assclown’s blog software sends out email spam masked as trackbacks.

If anybody is interested, here’s a track of the real “Veronica Domb” from Canada clicking the link to this post from her WP admin panel:
74.14.107.36 - - [21/Jan/2008:07:50:40 -0500] "GET /outing-plagiarist-2008-01-21/ HTTP/1.1" 200 9921 "http://oylinki.com/blog/wp-admin/edit-comments.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SU 3.005; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; Alexa Toolbar; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"

Common sense is not as common as you think.

Disclaimer: I’ve outed plagiarists in the past, because it works. Whether you do that on ego-SERPs or not depends on your ethics. Some folks think that’s even worse than theft and spamming. I say that publishing plagiarisms in the first place deserves bad publicity.



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MSN spam to continue says the Live Search Blog

MSN Live Search clueless webspam detectionIt seems MSN/LiveSearch has tweaked their rogue bots and continues to spam innocent Web sites just in case they could cloak. I see a rant coming, but first the facts and news.

Since August 2007 MSN runs a bogus bot faking a human visitor coming from a search results page, that follows their crawler. This spambot downloads everything from a page, that is images and other objects, external CSS/JS files, and ad blocks rendering even contextual advertising from Google and Yahoo. It fakes MSN SERP referrers diluting the search term stats with generic and unrelated keywords. Webmasters running non-adult sites wondered why a database tutorial suddenly ranks for [oral sex] and why MSN sends visitors searching for [MILF pix] to a teenager’s diary. Webmasters assumed that MSN is after deceitful cloaking, and laughed out loud because their webspam detection method was that primitive and easy to fool.

Now MSN admits all their sins –except the launch of a porn affiliate program– and posted a vague excuse on their Webmaster Blog telling the world that they discovered the evil cloakers and their index is somewhat spam free now. Donna has chatted with the MSN spam team about their spambot and reports that blocking its IP addresses is a bad idea, even for sites that don’t cloak. Vanessa Fox summarized MSN’s poor man’s cloaking detection at Search Engine Land:

And one has to wonder how effective methods like this really are. Those savvy enough to cloak may be able to cloak for this new cloaker detection bot as well.

They say that they no longer spam sites that don’t cloak, but reverse this statement telling Donna

we need to be able to identify the legitimate and illegitimate content

and Vanessa

sites that are cloaking may continue to see some amount of traffic from this bot. This tool crawls sites throughout the web — both those that cloak and those that don’t — but those not found to be cloaking won’t continue to see traffic.

Here is an excerpt from yesterdays referrer log of a site that does not cloak, and never did:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=webmaster&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=smart&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=progress&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=google&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=google&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=domain&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=database&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=content&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=business&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Why can’t the MSN dudes tell the truth, not even when they apologize?

Another lie is “we obey robots.txt”. Of course the spambot doesn’t request it to bypass bot traps, but according to MSN it uses a copy served to the LiveSearch crawler “msnbot”:

Yes, this robot does follow the robots.txt file. The reason you don’t see it download it, is that we use a fresh copy from our index. The tool does respect the robots.txt the same way that MSNBot does with a caveat; the tool behaves like a browser and some files that a crawler would ignore will be viewed just like real user would.

In reality, it doesn’t help to block CSS/JS files or images in robots.txt, because MSN’s spambot will download them anyway. The long winded statement above translates to “We promise to obey robots.txt, but if it fits our needs we’ll ignore it”.

Well, MSN is not the only search engine running stealthy bots to detect cloaking, but they aren’t clever enough to do it in a less abusive and detectable way.

Their insane spambot led all cloaking specialists out there to their not that obvious spam detection methods. They may have caught a few cloaking sites, but considering the short life cycle of Webspam on throwaway domains they shot themselves in both feet. What they really have achieved is that the cloaking scripts are MSN spam detection immune now.

Was it really necessary to annoy and defraud the whole Webmaster community and to burn huge amounts of bandwidth just to catch a few cloakers who launched new scripts on new throwaway domains hours after the first appearance of the MSN spam bot?

Can cosmetic changes with regard to their useless spam activities restore MSN’s lost reputation? I doubt it. They’ve admitted their miserable failure five months too late. Instead of dumping the spambot, they announce that they’ll spam away for the foreseeable future. How silly is that? I thought Microsoft is somewhat profit orientated, why do they burn their and our money with such amateurish projects?

Besides all this crap MSN has good news too. Microsoft Live Search told Search Engine Roundtable that they’ll spam our sites with keywords related to our content from now on, at least they’ll try it. And they have a forum and a contact form to gather complaints. Crap on, so much bureaucratic efforts to administer their ridiculous spam fighting funeral. They’d better build a search engine that actually sends human traffic.



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Microsoft funding bankrupt Live Search experiment with porn spam

If only this headline would be linkbait … of course it’s not sarcastic.

M$ PORN CASHRumors are out that Microsoft will launch a porn affiliate programm soon. The top secret code name for this project is “pornbucks”, but analysts say that it will be launched as “M$ SMUT CASH” next year or so.

Since Microsoft just can’t ship anything in time, and the usual delays aren’t communicated internally, their search dept. began to promote it to Webmasters this summer.

Surprisingly, Webmasters across the globe weren’t that excited to find promotinal messages from Live Search in their log files, so a somewhat confused MSN dude posted a lame excuse to a large Webmaster forum.

Meanwhile we found out that Microsoft Live Search does not only target the adult entertainment industry, they’re testing the waters with other money terms like travel or pharmaceutic products too.

Anytime soon the Live Search menu bar will be updated to something like this:
Live Search Porn Spam Menu

Here is the sad –but true– story of a search engine’s downfall.

A few months ago Microsoft Live Search discovered that x-rated referrer spam is a must-have technique in a sneaky smut peddlar’s marketing toolbox.

Since August 2007 a bogus Web robot follows Microsoft’s search engine crawler “MSNbot” to spam the referrer logs of all Web sites out there with URLs pointing to MSN search result pages featuring porn.

Read your referrer logs and you’ll find spam from Microsoft too, but perhaps they peeve you with viagra spam, offer you unwanted but cheap payday loans, or try to enlarge your penis. Of course they know every trick in the book on spam, so check for harmless catchwords too. Here is an example URL:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q= spammy-keyword &mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Microsoft’s spam bot not only leaves bogus URLs in log files, hoping that Webmasters will click them on their referrer stats pages and maybe sign up for something like “M$ Porn Bucks” or so. It downloads and renders even adverts powered by their rival Google, lowering their CTR; obviously to make programs like AdSense less attractive im comparison with Microsoft’s own ads (sorry, no link love from here).

Let’s look at Microsoft’s misleading statement:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

  • That’s not traffic, that’s bot activity: These hits come within seconds of being indexed by MSNBot. The pattern is like this: the page is requested by MSNBot (which is authenticated, so it’s genuine) and within a few seconds, the very same page is requested with a live.com search result URL as referer by the MSN spam bot faking a human visitor.
  • If that’s really a quality check to detect cloaking, that’s more than just lame. The IP addresses don’t change, the bogus bot uses a static user agent name, and there are other footprints which allow every cloaking script out there to serve this sneaky bot the exact same spider fodder that MSNbot got seconds before. This flawed technique might catch poor man’s cloaking every once in a while, but it can’t fool savvy search marketers.
  • The FUD “could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index” is laughable, because in most niches MSN search traffic is not existent.

All major search engines, including MSN, promise that they obey the robots exclusion standard. Obeying robots.txt is the holy grail of search engine crawling. A search engine that ignores robots.txt and other normed crawler directives cannot be trusted. The crappy MSN bot not even bothers to read robots.txt, so there’s no chance to block it with standardized methods. Only IP blocking can keep it out, but then it still seems to download ads from Google’s AdSense servers by executing the JavaScript code that the MSN crawler gathered before (not obeying Google’s AdSense robots.txt as well).

This unethical spam bot downloading all images, external CSS and JS files, and whatnot also burns bandwidth. That’s plain theft.

Since this method cannot detect (most) cloaking, and the so called “search quality control bot” doesn’t stop visiting sites which obviously do not cloak, it is a sneaky marketing tool. Whether or not Microsoft Live Search tries to promote cyberspace porn and on-line viagra shops plays no role. Even spamming with safe-at-work keywords is evil. Do these assclowns really believe that such unethical activities will increase the usage of their tiny and pretty unpopular search engine? Of course they do, otherwise they would have shutted down the spam bot months ago.

Dear reader, please tell me: what do you think of a search engine that steals (bandwidth and AdSense revenue), lies, spams away, and is not clever enough to stop their criminal activities when they’re caught?

Recently a Live Search rep whined in an interview because so many robots.txt files out there block their crawler:

One thing that we noticed for example while mining our logs is that there are still a fair number of sites that specifically only allow Googlebot and do not allow MSNBot.

There’s a suitable answer, though. Update your robots.txt:

User-agent: MSNbot
Disallow: /



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Gaming Sphinn is not worth it

Thou shalt not spam Sphinn!OMFG, yet another post on Sphinn? Yup. I tell you why gaming Sphinn is counter productive, because I just don’t want to read another whiny rant in the lines of “why do you ignore my stuff whilst A listers [whatever this undefined term means] get their crap sphunn hot in no time”. Also, discussions assuming that success equals bad behavior like this or this one aren’t exactly funny nor useful. As for the whiners: Grow the fuck up and produce outstanding content, then network politely but not obtrusive to promote it. As for the gamers: Think before you ruin your reputation!

What motivates a wannabe Internet marketer to game Sphinn?

Traffic of course, but that’s a myth. Sphinn sends very targeted traffic but also very few visitors (see my stats below).

Free uncondomized links. Ok, that works, one can gain enough link love to get a page indexed by the search engines, but for this purpose it’s not necessary to push the submission to the home page.

Attention is up next. Yep, Sphinn is an eldorado for attention whores, but not everybody is an experienced high-class call girl. Most are amateurs giving it a (first) try, or wrecked hookers pushing too hard to attract positive attention.

The keyword is positive attention. Sphinners are smart, they know every trick in the book. Many of them make a living with gaming creative use of social media. Cheating professional gamblers is a waste of time, and will not produce positive attention. Even worse, the shit sticks at the handle of the unsuccessful cheater (and in many cases the real name). So if you want to burn your reputation, go found a voting club to feed your crap.

Fortunately, getting caught for artificial voting at Sphinn comes with devalued links too. The submitted stories are taken off the list, that means no single link at Sphinn (besides profile pages) feeds them any more, hence search engines forget them. Instead of a good link from an unpopular submission you get zilch when you try to cheat your way to the popular links pages.

Although Sphinn doesn’t send shitloads of traffic, this traffic is extremely valuable. Many spinners operate or control blogs and tend to link to outstanding articles they found at Sphinn. Many sphinners have accounts on other SM sites too, and bookmark/cross-submit good content. It’s not unusual that 10 visits from Sphinn result in hundreds or even thousands of hits from StumbleUpon & Co. — but spinners don’t bookmark/blog/cross-submit/stumble crap.

So either write great content and play by the rules, or get nowhere with your crappy submission. The first “10 reasons why 10 tricks posts about 10 great tips to write 10 numbered lists” submission was fun. The 10,000 plagiarisms following were just boring noise. Nobody except your buddies or vote bots sphinn crap like that, so don’t bother to provide the community with footprints of your lousy gaming.

If you’re playing number games, here is why ruining a reputation by gaming Sphinn is not worth it. Look at my visitor stats from July to today. I got 3.6k referrers in 4 months from Sphinn because a few of my posts went hot. When a post sticks with 1-5 votes, you won’t attract much more click throughs than from those 1-5 folks who sphunn it (that would give 100-200 hits or so with the same amount of submissions). When you cheat, the story gets buried and you get nothing but flames. Think about that. Thanks.

Rank Last Date/Time Referral Site Count
1 Oct 09, 2007 @ 23:29 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1622 504
2 Oct 23, 2007 @ 14:53 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 2764 419
3 Nov 01, 2007 @ 03:42 http: / / sphinn.com 293
4 Oct 08, 2007 @ 04:21 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5469 288
5 Nov 02, 2007 @ 13:35 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 8883 192
6 Oct 09, 2007 @ 23:38 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4335 185
7 Oct 22, 2007 @ 23:55 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5362 139
8 Oct 29, 2007 @ 15:02 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming 131
9 Nov 02, 2007 @ 13:34 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 7170 131
10 Sep 10, 2007 @ 09:09 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1976 116
11 Oct 15, 2007 @ 22:40 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 6122 113
12 Sep 22, 2007 @ 13:39 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 3593 90
13 Oct 05, 2007 @ 21:56 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5648 87
14 Sep 22, 2007 @ 13:25 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4072 80
15 Oct 14, 2007 @ 17:24 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5973 77
16 Aug 30, 2007 @ 04:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1796 72
17 Oct 16, 2007 @ 05:46 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 6761 61
18 Oct 11, 2007 @ 05:56 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1447 60
19 Sep 13, 2007 @ 12:27 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4548 54
20 Nov 02, 2007 @ 22:14 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 11547 53
21 Sep 03, 2007 @ 09:34 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4068 44
22 Oct 09, 2007 @ 23:40 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5093 42
23 Nov 02, 2007 @ 01:46 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 248 41
24 Sep 14, 2007 @ 05:58 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 2287 36
25 Oct 31, 2007 @ 06:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 11205 35
26 Oct 07, 2007 @ 12:07 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 6124 25
27 Nov 01, 2007 @ 09:41 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ profile/ Sebastian 22
28 Aug 08, 2007 @ 10:52 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 245 21
29 Sep 02, 2007 @ 19:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 3877 17
30 Sep 22, 2007 @ 00:42 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4968 17
31 Oct 01, 2007 @ 12:49 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5310 17
32 Aug 30, 2007 @ 08:20 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4143 14
33 Sep 11, 2007 @ 21:38 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 3783 13
34 Nov 01, 2007 @ 15:50 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 2 11
35 Sep 01, 2007 @ 23:03 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 597 10
36 Oct 24, 2007 @ 18:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1767 10
37 Sep 15, 2007 @ 08:26 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 5469 8
38 Oct 30, 2007 @ 09:42 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming/ mostpopular 7
39 Oct 24, 2007 @ 18:38 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 10881 7
40 Oct 30, 2007 @ 01:19 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming/ page/ 2 6
41 Sep 20, 2007 @ 07:09 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ profile/ login/ Sebastian 5
42 Jul 22, 2007 @ 09:39 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 1017 5
43 Oct 13, 2007 @ 08:34 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ week 5
44 Sep 08, 2007 @ 04:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 4653 5
45 Oct 31, 2007 @ 06:55 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 11614 5
46 Aug 13, 2007 @ 03:06 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 2764/ editcomment/ 4018 4
47 Aug 23, 2007 @ 07:52 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 3593 4
48 Sep 20, 2007 @ 06:21 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 1 4
49 Oct 23, 2007 @ 15:01 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 748 3
50 Jul 29, 2007 @ 10:47 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ title/ Google- launched- a- free- ranking- checker 3
51 Sep 30, 2007 @ 21:13 http: / / sphinn.com/ category/ Google/ parent_ name/ Google 3
52 Aug 25, 2007 @ 04:47 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 3735 3
53 Sep 15, 2007 @ 11:28 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 5648 3
54 Sep 29, 2007 @ 01:35 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 7058 3
55 Oct 28, 2007 @ 22:56 http: / / sphinn.com/ greatesthits 3
56 Oct 23, 2007 @ 04:44 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 10380 3
57 Oct 27, 2007 @ 04:10 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 11233 3
58 Jul 13, 2007 @ 04:23 Google Search: http: / / sphinn.com 2
59 Jul 21, 2007 @ 03:19 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 849 2
60 Jul 27, 2007 @ 10:06 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 1447 2
61 Jul 30, 2007 @ 20:09 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 1796 2
62 Aug 07, 2007 @ 10:01 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 3 2
63 Aug 13, 2007 @ 11:20 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 2764 2
64 Sep 05, 2007 @ 05:23 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 3735 2
65 Aug 28, 2007 @ 01:56 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 3877 2
66 Aug 27, 2007 @ 10:01 http: / / sphinn.com/ submit.php? url= http: / / sebastians- pamphlets.com/ links/ categories 2
67 Aug 31, 2007 @ 14:13 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 4335 2
68 Sep 02, 2007 @ 14:29 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 1622 2
69 Sep 08, 2007 @ 19:48 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 4548 2
70 Sep 05, 2007 @ 01:07 http: / / sphinn.com/ submit.php? url= http: / / sebastians- pamphlets.com/ why- ebay- and- wikipedia- rule- googles- serps 2
71 Sep 06, 2007 @ 13:22 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 4 2
72 Sep 16, 2007 @ 13:30 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 3783 2
73 Sep 18, 2007 @ 11:55 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 5973 2
74 Sep 19, 2007 @ 08:15 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 6122 2
75 Sep 19, 2007 @ 14:37 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 6124 2
76 Oct 23, 2007 @ 00:07 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 10387 2
77 Jul 16, 2007 @ 18:21 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming/ category/ AllCategories/ parent_ name/ All Categories 1
78 Jul 19, 2007 @ 20:19 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 864 1
79 Jul 20, 2007 @ 15:57 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ title/ Buy- Viagra- from- Reddit 1
80 Jul 27, 2007 @ 10:48 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ title/ Blogger- to- rule- search- engine- visibility 1
81 Jul 31, 2007 @ 06:07 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ title/ The- Unavailable- After- tag- is- totally- and- utterly- useless 1
82 Aug 02, 2007 @ 14:45 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ history/ login/ Sebastian 1
83 Aug 03, 2007 @ 10:59 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 1976 1
84 Aug 06, 2007 @ 03:59 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ commented/ login/ Sebastian 1
85 Aug 15, 2007 @ 08:27 http: / / sphinn.com/ category/ LinkBuilding 1
86 Aug 15, 2007 @ 14:17 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 2764/ editcomment/ 4362 1
87 Aug 28, 2007 @ 13:42 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 849 1
88 Sep 09, 2007 @ 15:15 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ commented/ login/ flyingrose 1
89 Sep 10, 2007 @ 05:15 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 20 1
90 Sep 10, 2007 @ 05:55 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 19 1
91 Sep 11, 2007 @ 12:22 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 8 1
92 Sep 11, 2007 @ 23:13 http: / / sphinn.com/ category/ Blogging 1
93 Sep 12, 2007 @ 09:04 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 5362 1
94 Sep 13, 2007 @ 06:36 http: / / sphinn.com/ category/ GoogleSEO/ parent_ name/ Google 1
95 Sep 14, 2007 @ 08:21 http: / / hwww.sphinn.com 1
96 Sep 16, 2007 @ 14:52 http: / / sphinn.com/ GoogleSEO/ Did- Matt- Cutts- by- accident- reveal- a- sure- fire- procedure- to- identify- supplemental- results 1
97 Sep 18, 2007 @ 08:05 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5721 1
98 Sep 18, 2007 @ 09:08 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ title/ If- yoursquore- not- an- Amway- millionaire- avoid- BlogRush- like- the- plague 1
99 Sep 18, 2007 @ 10:02 http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 5973#wholecomment8559 1
100 Sep 19, 2007 @ 11:48 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ view/ voted/ login/ bhancock 1
101 Sep 19, 2007 @ 20:27 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ page/ 5 1
102 Sep 20, 2007 @ 00:39 http: / / blogmarks.net/ my/ marks,new? title= How to get the perfect logo for your blog& url= http: / / sebastians- pamphlets.com/ how- to- get- the- perfect- logo- for- your- blog/ & summary= & via= http: / / sphinn.com/ story/ 6122 1
103 Sep 20, 2007 @ 01:34 http: / / sphinn.com/ user/ page/ 3/ voted/ Wiep 1
104 Sep 24, 2007 @ 15:49 http: / / sphinn.com/ greatesthits/ page/ 3 1
105 Sep 24, 2007 @ 19:51 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 6761 1
106 Sep 24, 2007 @ 22:32 http: / / sphinn.com/ greatesthits/ page/ 2 1
107 Sep 26, 2007 @ 15:13 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 7170 1
108 Sep 29, 2007 @ 05:27 http: / / sphinn.com/ category/ SphinnZone 1
109 Oct 09, 2007 @ 11:44 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 8883 1
110 Oct 10, 2007 @ 10:04 http: / / sphinn.com/ published/ month 1
111 Oct 24, 2007 @ 15:07 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 10881 1
112 Oct 26, 2007 @ 09:53 http: / / sphinn.com/ story.php? id= 11205 1
113 Oct 30, 2007 @ 08:58 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming/ page/ 3 1
114 Oct 30, 2007 @ 12:31 http: / / sphinn.com/ upcoming/ most 1
Total  3,688


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Which Sebastian Foss is a spammer?

Obviously pissed by my post Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss, Sebastian Foss sent this email to Smart-IT-Consulting.com:

Remove your insults from your blog about my products and sites… as you may know promote-biz.net is not registered to my name or my company.. just look it up in some whois service. This is some spammer who took my software and is now selling it on his spammer websites. Im only selling my programs under their original .com domains and you did not receive any email from me since im only using doube-optin lists.

You may not know it - but insulting persons and spreading lies is under penalty.

Sebastian Foss
Sebastian Foss e-trinity Marketing Inc.
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

Well, that’s my personal blog, and I’ve a professional opinion about the software Sebastian Foss sells, more on that later. It’s public knowledge that spammers do register domains under several entities to obfuscate their activities. I’m not a fed, and I’m not willing to track down each and every multiple respectively virtual personality of a spammer, so I admit that there’s at least a slight possibility that the Sebastian Foss spamming my inbox from promote-biz.net is not the Sebastian Foss who wrote and sells the software promoted by the email spammer Sebastian Foss. Since I still receive email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss at promote-biz.net, I think there’s no doubt that this Sebastian Foss is a spammer. Well, Sebastian Foss himself calls him a spammer, and so do I. Confused? So am I. I’ll update my other post to reflect that.

Now that we’ve covered the legal stuff, lets look at the software from the desk of Sebastian Foss.

  • Blog Blaster claims to submit “ads” to 2,000,000 sites. Translation: Blog Blaster automatically submits promotional comments to 2 million blogs. The common description of this kind of “advertising” is comment spam.
    Sebastian Foss tells us that “Blog Blaster will automatically create thousands of links to your website - which will rank your website in a top 10 position!”. The common description of this link building technique is link spam.
    The sales pitch signed by Sebastian Foss explains “I used it [Blog Blaster] to promote my other website called ezinebroadcast.com and Blog Blaster produced thousands of links to ezinebroadcast.com - resulting in a #1 position in Google for the term “ezine advertising service”. So I understand that Sebastian Foss admits that he is a comment spammer and a link spammer.
    I’d like to see the written permissions of 2,000,000 bloggers allowing Sebastian Foss and his customers to spam their blogs: “Advertising using Blog Blaster is 100% SPAM FREE advertising! You will never be accused of spamming. Your ads are submitted to blogs whose owners have agreed to receive your ads.” Laughable, and obviously a lie. Did Sebastian Foss remember that “spreading lies is under penalty”? Take care, Sebastian Foss!
  • Feed Blaster with a very similar sales pitch aims to create the term feed spam. Also, it seems that FeedBlaster™ is a registered trademark of DigitalGrit Inc. And I don’t think that Microsoft, Sun and IBM are happy to spot their logos on Sebastian Foss’ site e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH
  • The Money License System aka Google Cash Machine seems to slip through a legal loophole. May be it’s not explicit illegal to sell software build to to trick Google Adwords respectively AdSense or ClickBank, but using it will result in account terminations and AFAIK legal actions too.
  • Instant Booster claims to spam search engines, and it does, according to many reports. The common term applied to those techniques is web spam.

All these domains (and there are countless more sites selling similar scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss) are registered by Sebastian Foss respectively his companies e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH or e-trinity Marketing Inc.

He’s in the business of newsgroup spam, search engine spam, comment spam … probably there’s no target left out. Searching for Sebastian Foss scam and similar search terms leads to tons of rip-off reports.

He’s even too lazy to rephrase his sales pitches, click a few of the links provided above, then search for quoted phrases you saw on every sales pitch to get the big picture. All that may be legal in Germany, I couldn’t care less, but it’s not legit. Creating and selling software for the sole purpose of spamming makes the software vendor a spammer. And he’s proud of it. He openly admits that he uses his software to spam blogs, search engines, newsgroups and whatever. He may make use of affiliates and virtual entities who send out the email spam, perhaps he got screwed by a chinese copycat selling his software via email spam, but is that relevant when the product itself is spammy?

What do you think, is every instance of Sebastian Foss a spammer? Feel free to vote in the comments.

Update 08/01/2007 Here is the next email from the desk of Sebastian Foss:

Hi,
thanks for the changes on your blog entry - however like i mentioned if you look up the domains which were advertised in the spam mails you will notice that they are not registered to me or my company. You can also see that visiting the sites you will see some guy took my products and is selling them for a lower price on his own websites where he is also copying all of my graphic files. The german police told me that they are receiving spam from your forms and that it goes directly to their trash… however please remove your entries about me from your blog - There is no sense in me selling my own products for a lower price on some cheap, stolen websites - if that would make sense then why do i have my own .com domains for my products ? I just want to make clear that im not sending out any spam mails - please get back to me.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Sebastian Foss
e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

It deserves just a short reply:

It makes perfect sense to have an offshore clone in China selling the same outdated and pretty much questionable stuff a little cheaper. This clone can do that because first there’s next to no costs like taxes and so on, and second he does it per spamming my inbox on a daily base, hence probably he sells a lot of the ‘borrowed’ stuff. Whether or not the multiple Sebastian Fosses are the same natural person is not my problem. I claim nothing but leave it up to you dear reader’s speculation, common sense, and probability calculation.



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Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss

Frequently I receive emails from very angry people complaining about various “SEO tools” and “Money Making Software” delivered from the desk of Sebastian Foss (AdBlaster, Instant Booster, eZine blaster, Blog Blaster, Feed Blaster, Newsgroup Blaster, eBay Cash Machine, Doorway Page Generator, Google Cash Machine, and countless more scams), which got their sites banned or which just didn’t work as promised, asking for a refund and demanding compensation. I’m sick of replying to all these emails to set the records straight, so here is the guy’s address:

e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd.
Sebastian Foss
Böhler Str.14
Lindlar, 51789, North Rhine-Westphalia
Germany [map]
Phone: +49 2266 478 230
Fax: +49 2266 478 197
email: sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

I suffer from his fraudulent and spammy activities too. I find his URLs in my referrer stats, I receive his email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss, and people get mad on me because they assume I’m him just because I blog about SEO and Internet marketing.

Here is the last email spam I got from Sebastian Foss1) at promote-biz.net:And here’s the attached HTML file:A smart investigator can should be capable to assign this URL on promote-biz.net to e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd., Sebastian Foss’ company in Lindlar, Germany.

If you’re sick of spam and scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss too, then turn him in. Last time I looked, sending out email spam is a crime in Germany. In case the spam report form below (courtesy of the german cops) doesn’t work, here you go: Police Lindlar, Germany.
SPAM REPORT (yellow background = mandatory)

Your coordinates:






What to report?







Provide internet address (URL), IP address, channel, email-ID (email header), and other information useful to track down the issue:



Details (mandatory!)

Witnesses (if any, provide names and addresses)

Perpetrator and site of crime:






Here’s a tiny sample of domains related to or operated by Sebastian Foss, according to Rip Off Report “[one of] the biggest scam artist[s] on the Internet”:
10-thousand-dollars.biz 101-website-traffic.com 2click.com auction-machine.com automatedriches.com automatic-mailer.com blog-blast.com blog-blaster.com cashcreation.com clickedcash.com dollarbuddy.biz etrinity.com feed-blast.com free-traffic-handbook.com hit-booster.com hitworkz.com income-builder.com income-machine.com incomeuniversity.com instant-booster.com megapromoter.com megawealthpackage.com minuteprofits.com money-license.com moneybank.com plugin-income.com press-blast.com promote-biz.net promotionpalace.com sebastianfoss.com seo-secret.com submit-it-easy.com …

It doesn’t hurt to link to this post with “Sebastian Foss” in the anchor text ;)

Update: I received a threat from Sebastian Foss, so I’ve edited this post (look for original text followed by changes). I’m not 100% certain which instance of “Sebastian Foss” sends out the email spam, but all known instances of Sebastian Foss are obviously spammers. More Information on the spammer Sebastian Foss and his clones respectively multiple/virtual personalities.



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No search, more fun: Netscape spamming Google

Google dislikes crawlable SERPs. But Google still indexes huge chunks of SERPs, and to make it worse, these disliked URLs sometimes rank above other useless webspam from Amazon, Ebay, and cohorts on the very first search result page.

For example Netscape is still flooding Google’s search index with crap as per the quality guidelines, which clearly state:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages […] that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Netscape.com lacks a robots.txt, but how many patterns does it need to identify these pages as SERPs? Next search.netscape.com has a robots.txt, but it lacks a Disallow: / directive, respectively Disallow’s of all their scripts generating search results.

Is it that simple to get gazillions of useless autogenerated pages ranking at Google? Indeed. Following the Netscape precedent every assclown out there can buy a SE-script, can crawl the Web for a bunch of niche keywords, and will earn free Google traffic just because he has “forgotten” to upload a proper robots.txt file and Google isn’t capable of detecting SERPs. I mean when they don’t run a few tests with Netscape-SERPs, where’s the point of an unenforced no-crawlable-SERPs policy?

I just found another interesting snippet in Google’s quality guidelines:

If a site doesn’t meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index.

I certainly will not miss 1,360,000 URLs from a spamming site ;)



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When your referrer stats turn into a porn TGP

When you wonder why your top referrers are porn galleries, make-you-rich-in-a-second scams and other pages which don’t carry your link but try to sell you something, read further.

Referrer spamming is done by bots requesting pages from your site, leaving a bogus HTTP_REFERER. These spam bots come from various IPs, change their user agents on the fly, and use other sneaky techniques to slip thru spam protection. Some of them are somewhat clever by adjusting the number of bogus requests to your site by your Alexa stats to ensure their “visits” do appear on limited realtime referrer lists and other stats by referrer. Some of them even suck the whole pages from your server, and a few even follow redirects.

So what can you do? Not much. You can’t really get rid of these log entries, because the logs are written before your spam protection handles those requests. But you can reduce the waste of bandwidth and server resources. If you redirect these requests, your server sends only a header, but not the contents. Here is a way to accomplish that:

First of all, extract the bogus referrers from your logs or stats pages, and save them in a plain text file:
Change this to a list of domains, truncating subdomains like “www” or “galleries”, and add .htaccess code:

SetEnvIf Referer \.collegefuckfest\.com GoFuckYourself=1
SetEnvIf Referer \.asstraffic\.com GoFuckYourself=1
SetEnvIf Referer \.allinternal\.com GoFuckYourself=1
SetEnvIf Referer \.mature-lessons\.com GoFuckYourself=1
SetEnvIf Referer \.wildpass\.com GoFuckYourself=1
SetEnvIf Referer \.promote-biz\.net GoFuckYourself=1

This code will create an environment variable “GoFuckYourself” with the value “1″. Following statements can now work with these marked requests:

RewriteCond %{ENV:GoFuckYourself} 1 [NC]
RewriteRule /* %{HTTP_REFERER} [R=301,L]

This redirects the request to its referrer, so if the bogus bot follows redirects, it will request a page from the spammer’s domain. Of course you can redirect to a static URL too:
RewriteRule /* http://www.example.com/gofuckyourself [R=301,L]

You could also use the environment variable in deny statements
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=GoFuckYourself

but that will serve a complete page, and may produce an infinite loop. Deny as well as the similar RewriteRule .* - [F] enforce a 403-Forbidden. Then if you’ve an ErrorDocument 403 /getthefuckouttahere.html directive, the request of the error page runs into the 403 itself - this process calls itself over and over until it gets terminated after 20 or so loops.



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