Today I post the next part of the post “Social Media Wolves”. You can read the first part of the article here.

6. Forum spam
Internet forums are justly considered the first robin of Web 2.0 technology. Being the integral part of traditional Internet, forums correspond to Web 2.0 philosophy in its very essence that is the user generated content. No wonder that the forums have become the first hunting field for social media wolves.

The social media wolves’ forum activities may be represented as either direct spam or veiled forum talks accompanied by putting some links. In the former case, special script spreads through forum base the posts of explicitly advertising nature. However, this technique is rather inefficient as more than 90 per cent of such posts are usually deleted by moderators. In the latter case, wolves place their ads in forums as just the routine users’ discussions. Expertly treated, such allocations are generally perceived as matter-of-course comments.

7. Spam blogs
Common users create blogs when they have some experience to share. Unlike them, social media wolves start blogs only if they lack external links for other projects SEO promotion.

Spam blog or splog is a blog functioning only as a tool for contributing links to other websites. Social media wolves put the links to the projects being promoted in the framework of downscale and often computer-generated texts. The search engines traditionally consider blogs to be accredited resources and assign links put on them rather high level of authority. It is worth mentioning in this respect that search bot is hardly able to discriminate between real blog and splog.

The estimated splogs share in blogosphere ranges from 5 to 20 per cent. Moreover, there are vast splog farms which produce batches of such spam resources. Now it is clear that social media wolves pollute blogosphere on the line production basis.

8. Comment spam
You are sure to have come across the blogs comprising few guests and few subscribers, but despite all this boasting numerous post comments. One of the inherent features of such blogs is that all the added comments are surprisingly similar: usually consisting of one or two lines they all run something like: “This is a very helpful article, very informative one!”, or just: “Cool!”

Every post is supported by somewhat hundreds of such comments, but still it does not mean that the audience of this blog is very active. It rather means that this blog is actively used by social media wolves for getting spam links.

Adding comments to blog posts, users may put there a link to their website. This is the opportunity so widely used by the wolves who add thousands of computer-generated or written by third rate freelancers comments (according to IP analysis the most part of such commentators is from India and China).

There is even more advanced way of promotion by means of adding comments – trackbacks. Trackbacks are the notices placed in comments warning that a link to another resource was put on the website or blog. Such trackbacks are perceived as the links to the page of the given resource. The wolves put numerous links to hundreds of outside websites on the chosen site and then wait until the links are marked by trackbacks. After all they simply delete them. Thus, using this simple trick, they get hundreds of links and develop the website authority for search engines. As you can see the wolves can hardly be stopped by anything.

9. Spam articles spreading
Have you ever noticed that Wiki resources providing the opportunity of adding free articles are generally full of articles containing little point but a lot of links to outside websites? Social media wolves are surely responsible for this.

Third rate copywriters or even special scripts make downscale texts relevant to link topics. In such case the topic has two main functions: on the one hand, the topic of the text with the links is important for some search algorithms considering this very variable; on the other hand, moderators are much more favorable towards topic links.

Sometimes, the wolves carry themselves even in a more impudent way: they choose allocated article written by others and dilute it with their own links. Thus, they both impair general impression on the article and mark its author with the spammer stamp. Does it seem a misdealing to you? Sorry, but where did you meet the wolves following common decencies?

10. Artificial communities
Have you ever been invited into some communities on Facebook, Linkedin or LiveJournal? Have you ever wondered why you are invited in such groups as “Denver Freight Carriages”, “Vietnamese Curio Shop” or, what is more, “Make Quick Money at Home!”?

All such groups are created and promoted by social media wolves. As a rule, the creation of such groups is intended either for redirecting a guest by the link put into the group description (not so long ago it was a very frequently used way of promoting some Internet projects) or to sell users something directly in the group (Have you ever guessed why you were invited in the group “Calvin Klein at half-price”?).

It is quite notable that users join even the most absurd groups like “Dildo shop” as it is very well understandable through at least the size of such groups.

Social media are successfully testing and implementing new anti-spam filters but the wolves are still equally successful in finding various avoiding routes. This counterstrategy has begun long ago and there is no bottom to it yet.

It is a common knowledge that Facebook provides the fee-paying service of creating branded groups providing vast opportunities for their promotion. However, the wolves would never pay for anything that can be got absolutely free even though to accomplish the task they would have to show the teeth.

Wolf-hunting never stops. They are hunted by social media technical departments which adjust algorithms to the wolves’ habits and develop filters protecting from their attacks.

Common users hate the wolves and send corresponding reports to support services at the earliest opportunity.

Thousands of wolves’ profiles are deleted and added to black-lists by support service specialists.

And still we should confess that social media wolves live not only by their teeth but also by their brains. Despite the fact that more and more advanced protection means are constantly implemented into the web environment, the wolves survive by inventing more and more devious methods of attacks.

A recipe for such endurance is very simple. Being among this breed is an extraordinary lucrative employment. This is precisely why social media wolves are not threatened with extinction as there is always place for those who are ready to endure any hounding to listen to the precious whisper of new C-notes.