For a few days I looked at my dash being flooded by people who were clicking on “like” on every post I’ve written. I was puzzled because they had weird user names and no discernible interest in anything I’ve written. In the course of maybe one hour, they would “Heart” 200 posts. Even though the accounts were swiftly deleted, it was annoying and really interrupted my dash because I do look at it to see if people respond, leave comments, reblog, etc. But I think I figured out what they are doing and why.
A couple of years ago (which, in internet time is like, last century), the fad that guided marketers in their pursuits was SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The legend claimed that, the more your site was linked to in outside sources, the higher it would rank in Google’s search algorithm. That means that, if people searched for (just as an example) “soft drink”, and Coca Cola’s website was mentioned in millions of other websites, associated with the words “soft drink”, it would be the first result to pop in a search. That’s why so many corporations were suddenly “taking part in conversations”, sending astroturfing goons to post comments in websites and leave links. The links weren’t so much designed to attract traffic as they were meant to increase the amount of mentions in sites other than the ones that belonged to the corporation itself. Google claims that this was part of their algorithm only for a period of time but that it no longer applies (and they claim it hasn’t applied for quite some time now). We don’t know for sure because the algorithm is secret and protected by patents and property laws.
However, spammers are still operating under the assumption that this SEO principle still applies. In the past, in order to create fake links, they had to create hundreds of bogus blogs, usually in platforms like Blogpost, copy pasting hundreds of entries (usually stolen from other sites) and randomly inserting links in these entries pointing to their spamming site, the one they used to sell whatever it is that spammers sell (fake watches, pills, meds, you name it).
Tumblr has, unintentionally, made the fake link creation easier. Every time you click on the “Heart”, a link to your site is permanently created on the post you “Hearted”. I noticed the spammers are using a script of sorts, or domain hosting redirection service so that they link their Tumblr account to domains outside Tumblr (that is no secret or shady deal, I do that myself with the domain on which I run this very blog). So, they are “Hearting” thousands of posts per hour, creating fake links to their sites, in the hope that they will improve their Google presence. So, they believe that, when people search for whatever it is they are selling, their fake sites will pop at the top.
This won’t work, though. But it would take a whole lot of technical stuff to explain why so I’ll leave that for another post. Suffice to say, for now, that at least I figured out why they are annoying the hell out of me.
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