Spammers Hijack Popular Promotion Technique

Have you ever been to a great website and noticed a link asking you to share the site with a friend?  Odds are that you have.  It is a very popular way of using word-of-mouth advertising for the site.  After all, we’re much more likely to trust the recommendation of a friend than we are to trust hype and ads from strangers.  It’s that friend-to-friend approach that makes this technique so appealing.

Here’s the way it works.  You go to a site that you like and click on their “share this site” link.  Once the page loads, you simply put in your name, your e-mail address, the e-mail addresses of your friends and a brief message.  Then you click “send” and then software on the website’s server sends your recommendation to your friends.  It sounds good, right?  Well it was good, but now (like so many other things) it has been co-opted for SPAM.

You see spammers are going to these sites and loading them up with harvested e-mail addresses and a “personal message” that is nothing more than an ad for whatever product or site they are really pushing.    I cannot tell you how many times a day I get some alleged “recommendation” from someone I don’t know, only to find out that it is a thinly disguised ad for some medication, home refinance scheme or porn site.  It’s not only annoying, but it’s downright criminal!!  The spammer is not only stealing the legitimate site’s bandwidth and reputation, but they are also putting the legitimate site in danger of having their IP address blocked by ISPs for spam.

As a webmaster, you should really think long and hard about this before putting this type of link on your website.  After all, it’s your reputation and site that gets hurt from this type of attack.  You’ll note that we do not have a “recommend this site” link on our website.  This is the main reason why.  As for me, I think I’ll stick to safer and, in the long run, more beneficial promotion methods such as article promotion, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and forum participation.  That’s my recommendation for you, too.

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