Spammers using social media

Spammers don't just linkspam Wikipedia, they use various methods to gather the links they need to get their sites on top of the organic search results. One of the new methods in the last months has been spamming the social bookmarking networks like Digg and del.icio.us.

Niall Kennedy has an excellent article, uncovering such a spam network and it's motives. He shows how it's relatively easy to abuse these services to quickly gain links, even with articles unrelated to your site's content. The article in question is a weight loss article, placed on a dental care website...

For people fighting spam, and I don't just mean Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik, but also those Wikipedia spam fighters out there, this is a very nice read, and helps to understand these spammers and the way they work.