So this blog recently got a spam attack, which is the third time or so that such a thing has happened. This last one was the worst one.

I don't mind spam, as I view it as part of the game. The software I'm using to run this blog, LifeType, is one of the hidden gems in the open source world, in my opinion; if you're running a blog network, you should definitely look into it. Although beware of its deficiencies in spam protection (there are some plugins that can help you on this front, I'm in the process of getting them installed).

But a word of advice to spammers: please read Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation [pdf]. The basic idea: if you acquire 10,000 links to your site, all of which come from comments in blog posts that were made months ago, all from sites that are not contextually related to yours, all with more or less the same anchor text, well that is pretty much a dead give away to the search engines that you're a spammer. Now, one strategy could be to go GoogleBowling, and attempt to make a competitor of yours look like a spammer, although you may find that to be ethically problematic, socially alienating, and I'm not even sure if GoogleBowling would work via mass blog spamming (although there are other ways that it works). Anyway, spammers, I highly recommend you check out GrayWolf's post on GoogleBowling. Generally speaking, though, the key to search engine spamming and SEO in general is to be a few steps ahead of the engines -- not behind. As Google gets more information about users, expect the algorithm to switch from favoring links to favoring clickstream data. For spammers, it may be time to switch strategies from building fake web sites and fake links to building fake users and fake clickstreams.

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