Spam: A Love Story (No. It’s a Nightmare.)

Many of us are entrenched with the Internet, both for work, social connecting, and the services it offers.

This is due to the nature of the Internet being attention seeking. Websites seek traffic. Ads seek recipients. Influencers and social media seek eyes. You get the idea.

Generally, there are two ways to get such an audience. You can either A) have something interesting to show off to attract eyes, or B) show off your message in whatever way possible. Spam, the ubiquitous offspring of the Internet, found that option B was much easier to pull off.

Spam doesn’t care if its message is enticing enough to spread naturally. It just spreads indiscriminately and, without moderation, quickly. But as the Internet matured, safeguards to it eventually became commonplace.

SEO spam: The vice of good ranking

Search engines are valuable because they do more than just find websites with the right arrangement of letters. They look at keywords, analytics, and traffic to quickly determine where you might want to be, and SEO Spam, or “spamdexing” tries to take advantage of that to achieve easy traffic gains.

The goal is to rank higher on search engines without higher quality content to offer, even for just a short period of time, which creates some principles for a scammy website.

Spam loves keywords

It’s a simple trick: increasing the number of keywords would make early algorithms believe a web page was more likely to cover a topic more in-depth. This usually leads to the website being queried, even when the actual content is unrelated to the desired topic.

Bad actors could hack an innocent website and inject keywords into the title, header, or meta tags, directing traffic into their own web properties to act maliciously. If a website’s business or domain doesn’t seem to cover what you’re looking for, it’s best to ignore it or report it.

Spam loves advertisements

Spam typically works best when its message reaches audiences that don’t question the context of what they’re seeing, which works in both media and medium.

Ads are usually a great gateway to spam: their material can be largely unrelated without question; this can be harder with methods like keyword stuffing, where misrelated topics tend to be more noticable.

And this also works out for the spammers, as the traffic that comes from the host’s domain tends to be from people who have at least a positive opinion on their domain, increasing the chances of a bad actor to take advantage to submit fraud or malware.

Installing a trusted ad blocker can help prevent situations like these from occurring.

Spam loves links

Spam can’t exist without links, simply for the reason of links being the medium to reach the desired domain of the spam.

This can be as simple as a spam website’s content not using many external links, as a low effort spam content is less likely to drive traffic away from their own domain. But the ratio of internal vs external links is a low level trick, and something that less beginner spam can avoid being detected for these days.

A higher level is an outside attacker injecting links off visible portions of a website, which human traffic can’t see, but bots and algorithms (like the search engine) can and will attribute to a website. This has the effect of driving traffic to specific websites, which leads to the potential of humans seeing and interacting with other scammy web properties.

The best thing to do is to never click on suspicious links, as they could range from fraudulent advertisements to malware.

Email spam: Straight to your (e)Mailbox

The more famous kind of spam to hear about is email spam, unsolicited emails sent to a large number of people. They tend to attempt to either advertise a product/service, or to defraud you with a claim of a product/service/event, usually with specific promises and vague greetings.

Plenty of phish in the sea

Phishing emails are made to look as if they come from legitimate organizations, for the purposes of making false claims to the recipient.

The goal is to trick the recipient into providing important information, such as passwords, bank account numbers, or credit card information.

These emails rely on the user thinking the email is sent from a trusted source, such as a bank or other financial / government associated institution, and will usually ask the recipient to click a link to provide needed information.

The general rule of thumb is to always be suspicious of emails that ask for personal information by using a specific link.

Looks like you won… a scam

Scam emails, a superset of phishing emails, try to trick the recipient into sending money or providing personal information by fraudulent means. Senders might impersonate loved ones or managers, or they could claim you won a lottery ticket and first need to send a collection fee.

In general, these emails often promise goods or money in exchange for the recipient’s cooperation or money. 

This can be a more lengthy process, involving downloading software themselves, sending a check, or any other form of making the recipient do the work themselves, and therefore placing blame on them if they discover they were tricked.

Even a tiny bit of guesswork or research on the recipient can make a scam email become very convincing, so it is important to be cautious when opening any email that seems too good to be true.

Links that do the work for you

Malware-containing emails contain viruses, spyware, or other harmful software that can infect the recipient’s computer or device.

Some emails may look harmless, but may come with links or attachments that the recipient either doesn’t recognize or believes to be safe. If clicked or installed, it comes with the high risk of installing malware onto the recipient’s computer.

Malware can be used to damage the device, steal sensitive information, or gain unauthorized access to the recipient’s computer. For this reason, never ever click on a link or attachment that has not been verified, and use official links whenever possible.

We don’t love spam. Neither does Google.

The nice thing about modern day Google is that its search engine is more than just a website finder: it’s an algorithm, and a business model. A bad algorithm loses trust in users, which takes away ad revenue, so it’s in their best interest to combat it as effectively as possible.

Google has access to nearly two billion websites to train its search engines on what is likely spam, and what isn’t. The biggest factors they tend to consider are IP address characteristics, domains/subdomains, authentication status of bulk senders, user feedback, etc, etc.

The deal is, some spam is avoidable through filters and techniques, and others will just eventually parade into our devices and accounts.

Good SEO takes both good design, knowledge on users, and proper attack prevention, but good spam only needs proper attention to detail and some safeguards to make perusing the Internet more worthwhile and efficient.