Guestbook Spamming

Are you one of those people who believes that it's okay to make a buck at just about any cost short of murder? Would your friends characterize you as "scum"? Do you believer that the way to the top is on a pile of dead bodies? If this describes you, then you'll love this search engine spamming technique.

Millions of webmasters all over the internet work away day and night, creating websites large and small, to communicate their lives and feelings to others. These websites are quite often a communication directly from the soul. Whether well written or not, people put their hearts and souls into their words and pictures, and oftentimes all they want in return is for someone to leave a note in their guestbook.

Sometimes these notes are quick and fast: "nice site", "well done" or "good". Occasionally the entries are long, rambling messages of praise or perhaps just notes of similar feelings or some other communication. These comments can make the webmasters day, proving that someone out there in the world has at least acknowledged that they created someone worthwhile.

I know many people who live for the day they receive a snippet of praise from someone, anyone. Can you imagine how they feel when they find a guestbook entry which simply says "visit blah blah site". No praise, no comment, nothing of any value to the webmaster.

Even worse, think about the face of the lady who has spent a year pouring out her soul to the world when she find a hundred guestbook entries advertising some vile pornography. Image how she feels learning her site has advertised, even for a moment, something she despises. 

In fact, horrible as it seems, this scenario is becoming more and more common every day. It's becoming normal for some poor webmaster to open his guestbook and find, much to her disgust, a dozen, a hundred or even thousands of ads, all linked to sites of all types.

It's called guestbook spamming. 

Why on earth would people do this? What's going on here? Surely people reading those guestbooks don't visit those sites very often, do they? 

Well no, they don't. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising to find that no one ever clicked on any of those links. They are usually pretty obviously advertisements of the worst sort with no socially redeeming value of any kind. In fact, they usually have a sameness about them that's well, robotic.

There is a good reason for this - the entries are usually performed by software specially designed to do exactly this one task: leave advertisements in guestbooks. There are services that charge significant amounts of money to send these robots all over the web, leaving their little pieces of dung in thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of guestbooks.

The idea is simple. Google (the number one and most important source of visitors to a web site) determines the value and validity of web pages and sites based upon the number and quality of incoming links. The algorithm is complex, but it boils down to a simple rule: the more links the better (with some exceptions).

And guess what, links from guestbooks count as links to Google. This means a site which adds a hundred thousand links to as many guestbooks might go up a few notches in the search engine results. This could potentially mean thousands of dollars in increased sales. In a highly competitive field this technique could spell the different between a site's success and failure.

How is this done? When you look at the HTML pages of a web site, it's usually pretty easy to determine which links are to guestbooks. A spider simply scans web pages, looking for those patterns and recording the matches. Later, when a client pays some money, those pages are visited again and a little present is left. A very unpleasant surprise for a webmaster.

There is every reason to believe that Google (and other search engines as well) will (if they have not already) handle this spamming technique. It's just as easy for Google to spot a guestbook page as it is for any spamming robot, so it would, conceptually, be  simple matter for the search engine to simply ignore guestbooks when calculating page rankings.

How does a webmaster protect himself? 

• One good way is to disallow HTML in guestbooks entries. This will pretty much eliminate the issue entirely. 
• A webmaster should examine his guestbooks regularly, purging entries which do not belong.
• The guestbook should include the meta tag to prevent search engines from spidering the page. This, at the least, prevents the vile spammers from gaining from their malicious postings.

What is acceptable to post in a guestbook?

• Praise of any kind
• Any kind of positive message about the site, the webmaster or the content.
• An invitation to join a group which the webmaster might be interested in.
• An invitation to join a webring or similar thing

Most guestbooks have a page to add a URL and that's the proper place to include a link. It's assumed that the webmaster may visit the posters site if he or she is interested.

Additional Information

• Maintain Your Guestbook Many webmasters include a guestbook on their site. Guestbooks are important and must be well kept to be useful.
• Graphics in guestbooks are cool If you want, you can leave a small graphic in a guestbook to add some class.
• Using Photoloft for your images If you are leaving presents in guestbooks, it's important not to steal bandwidth. Photoloft is an inexpensive way to leave presents without being unethical.
• Bandwidth stealing Bandwidth stealing is the linking to images or scripts from another site without permission, thus using that sites bandwidth without compensation.
• Sins of the internet- Bandwidth Stealing This sin costs hosts millions of dollars a year - and often you don't even know that you did it!
• Netiquette - Guestbook Entries Guestbooks are a great way to leave public messages to a webmaster. Just be nice, complementary and helpful.