Tag Spam, See Also, X is Related to Y
I think the biggest form of spam to hit the web in the next year or so is going to be heavy social spam. Not just the stuff Seth mentioned here (where is appears that LookSmart is leading the charge to irrelevancy on yet another front) but lots of other stuff too.
A while ago I mentioned a few tips for getting quick and easy co-citation data, and I have also mentioned shopping comparison pages and writing natural content but I think many new traffic sources are easy to manipulate right now. Since they are all rapidly evolving and fighting for marketshare they are going to leave many algorithmic holes open along the way.
On many sites I have seen people upload images for related products or companies using their company or URL as their username or tag name. Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, AOL, and eBay are all experimenting with tagging. You can tag something that gets millions of pageviews from predefined relevant traffic source
if you are a musician and friends tell you that you sound like an established star and you submit your song to YouTube or Google Video do you label it to include a similar star's name in the title or have a friend tag it with someone else's name? Dare you cover old songs you like and submit those? If related content is already listed does it hurt to vote for it / list it as one of your favorites / tag it with your URL?
Get in early on market edges and get exposure in the new verticals. Depending on your vertical and brand investment some techniques may provide different risk / reward ratios.
Comments
I'm running a couple of affiliate sites lately and I'm afraid I'm one of those who are fond of uploading images for product presentation. In this case I use the domain name of my site as username.
I was thinking that it could increase my traffic and that SEs can easily point users to my site. Oh my! I didn't this is a crime!
We ran an integrated search campaign for a client to promote their products' use in the new Fast and the Furious movie, Tokyo Drift. As part of the campaign we uploaded a commercial featuring a clip from the movie to YouTube, Google and Yahoo video and created a MySpace profile featuring the commercials.
So far the commerical has been viewed over 40,000 times, downloaded from Google almost 1000 times and overall received very positive feedback. Of course we used the Fast and the Furious name to help boost it's views.
If used correctly social networking sites can be a great low cost route for advertising. Of couse if it is a crap product/content then it can backfire on you just as quickly. Overall it can be a very effective tool if you are promoting the right product/content but for those looking to abuse it I'd be leary as the community network effects work both ways.
Anything good will sooner or later be smeared by the bad. AdSense? Sites for AdSense. Quality content? Article scrapers. Blogs? Comment spam and massive blog spamming.
Similar is the fate of social bookmarking services: they can also be used for spamming and I've been just waiting how long it will take for spammers to understand how to exploit them.
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