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Wired: When the spam hits the blogs

Wired wrote about referral link spam back in 2002 and interviewed yours truly.
Dabitch 1 min read
Wired: When the spam hits the blogs

Wired wrote "when-the-spam-hits-the-blogs" about a nuisance called "referral marketing."

But search rank improvement or not, bloggers want referral marketers to leave their logs alone.
"It's not just that they somehow sneak into my weblog, it's that they are hitting my site so hard. One day there were more than a thousand hits from one single porn site," complained Åsk Wäppling, known to bloggers as "Dabitch."
Wäppling runs Adland, a blog on advertising.
"I did not put that site up to serve as some tag-board for cybermarketeers," Wäppling said. "It really irks me."
When they first realized their referral logs were being spammed, most bloggers wondered what the point of such a seemingly limited spam campaign could be.
But as several posts on discussion site Metafilter pointed out, the real target may be those automatically updated link lists on some bloggers' sites.
"They're trying to jump-start a meme," blogger Jerry Kindall said. "Rather than mailing (an advertisement) directly to people, they're sending it to the sites where people go to get cool new links."
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