I’ve noticed an uptick in twitter spam recently, and knowing some people who work at twitter, i’ve been trying to keep an eye out for particularly egregious cases that i might be able to point their way. There’re a lot of spammers who are the equivalent of smash and grab artists. Spin up a new account, blast as many people as one can with links, as quickly as possible until you’re shut down. I’m sure you’ve seen lots of stuff like this:
These sorts of accounts almost always get banned after a couple hours, however, whatever process Twitter uses to ban these accounts takes painfully long. I’ve watched accounts continue to spam people for hours after i’ve hit the “report spam” button, blasting people with messages you could easily filter using a regular expression. I usually just use curl -I to figure out where they intend to redirect me
But what frustrates me more than the smash and grab @ replies, far more, are the spam account follows. I actually filter through all the people who follow me, partially out of curiosity, and to make sure that i’m not missing people of interest to me (not famous enough to warrant ignoring real people who follow me). So when I see patterns that again, one could catch with a fairly rudimentary filter, i usually take the 5 minutes it takes to suss out what the scam is.
So, when i noticed this in my inbox today, it was pretty easy to see which accounts were involved in the scam:
So what exactly is the scam? Oh… i see.
See, this is a particularly stupid scam, because in spite of what @SoaringVenture (no link, so no google juice) wants, tweets are all set so that search engines don’t follow their links.
So, all these jackasses are really succeeding at is annoying me (and presumably others), and demonstrating once again that not only is SEO bullshit, but SEO purveyors are idiots on top of it. If you want a higher pagerank, make content that people want and care about. There’s no dearth of interesting ways to improve the world. SEO is not one of them.
