• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

SEO Spammers run amok on Gmail

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 19, 2008 in Web spam

Google says that spammers haven’t cracked their Gmail captcha system yet, that the spammers are paying low-cost labor in overseas markets to sign up for Gmail accounts.

All I can tell you is that I have now banned Gmail registrations from two forums. A lot of people with Gmail accounts send me legitimate email but the bogus forum registrations don’t even come close to looking like real people.

Although I have recently had serious email issues on Xenite.Org, I found that the worst offending services were basic home ISP services (I have blacklisted all RoadRunner accounts on Xenite for the near-term at least). The email spammers have huge networks of zombie PCs running on various home accounts and they don’t really need Gmail accounts. After all, the point of email spam is not to get someone to reply to the message but rather to get someone to click on the link(s) embedded in the message.

Gmail forum spam is all about getting links in forums. The forum link spammers by no means rely only on Gmail accounts but they use a LOT of them. As many as 1/3 of all bogus forum registrations may be tied to Gmail accounts on some days. Since forum registrations often require email-based authentication, those Gmail accounts have to exist or else the spammers cannot use them to compromise Web forums.

I don’t hold Google responsible for the fact that it enables spamming. Gmail is just another Web-based service that is being abused. And though I could argue that Google AdSense has spawned a massive spamming industry, the real issue here is that black hat link spammers are abusing not only Google but forums and in particular forums over which I have some control.

You can whitelist or blacklist email domains in many forum applications now. I’ve got a huge and growing list of spam domains that can no longer be used for forum registrations. I don’t expect many of those domains to remain in existence but I don’t dare remove them. Unfortunately for Gmail users (and many SEOs like Gmail), I have had to place Gmail in both blacklists and I — quite frankly — don’t see me ever removing Gmail from the blacklists.

It’s not worth the hassle for me to allow Gmail registrations, but something that Google and other free email service providers could do is automatically disable forum authentication messages. Don’t bounce them, just block them. Once the Gmail spammers realize they can no longer abuse the forums through those services I (and presumably other forum operators) can stop blacklisting Gmail (and other free email services).

Maybe Gmail and other services can allow 1-10 forum registrations a month. After that, you have to pay $10 per registration. Why should Gmail charge people to allow their forum authentication messages through? Because if spammers continue to abuse Gmail freely I’m pretty sure a LOT of forums will start blocking Gmail. That’s the only solution that we forum operators have available to us.

My Webforums have been sending out more authentication messages to Gmail spammers than to legitimate new users. THAT’s a serious problem for me because it eats up my server’s bandwidth. It eats up my CPU’s processing time. It ties up my email and forum applications with bogus registrations. It eventually forces my moderators to go in and delete messages and ban accounts.

So it makes more sense for me (and other forum operators) to just ban Gmail and wait for Google to get back control over its email service. Unfortunately, as we have seen with “rel=’nofollow’”, Google isn’t willing to do what is necessary to combat Web spam. Instead of making one simple change in their algorithm they are badgering Webmasters everywhere to take responsibility for monitoring links.

Well, Google, I’ve found a pretty damned effective way of monitoring links: Your services are forbidden to participate in MY forums becaue YOU encourage people to create spammy links.