Sphinn - Pligg Auto Submitter/Spammer and how to protect your site

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Pligg Auto Submitter/Spammer and how to protect your site

Went Hot: August 2, 2008 - 1:31 am
Posted By: Lisadit 337 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.chewie.co.uk)
Category: Other Online Marketing

Dean Chew goes through a big breakthrough with Syndk8's release of Auto Pligg Submitter. Pligg is basically a clone of Digg. Some of our most beloved sites, like Sphinn is using the Pligg engine. What can this release do? Spam the heck out of your site, and it even breaks CAPTHAS!! Ouch. Read Chewie's blogpost to see what you as a Webmaster can do to avoid your site being hit by what this Auto Submitter/Spammer can do.

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from Chewie 337 days ago #

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Thanks for the submission Lisa, hopefully people will find this useful from both sides.

from SearchWizard 337 days ago #

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Nice read, the black-hats seem to keep coming out with this clever stuff... wonder how many $189 sales are needed to make their time investment back?
might keep my eye out for the torrent ;o)

from evilgreenmonkey 337 days ago #

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Erm, not a good idea to torrent a black hat's app. Sometimes you come off pretty bad, not that I'd know :o)

Thanks for the bandwidth,

Rob

from g1smd 337 days ago #

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All this just because of the obsession with links.

from Chewie 337 days ago #

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ChrisLang:

The thing is if you are using it for BH perposes then you EXPECT your site to get banned at some point. Churn and burn is the name of the game and this tool will help you to get indexed quickly and a ton of back links in a short period of time.

Besides you could use it very conservitively for a steady build up of links.

from NickWilsdon 337 days ago #

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Automation isn't necessarily BH. Take spam deletion for example, most of us are happy to use a time-saving plugin which will detect and delete this stuff instead of clicking through it manually.

I can see how this tool would be useful if you publish marketing articles and want to submit them to 20-30 relevant sites at the same time. Chris is right though, this is a complete re-run of the FFA's/guestbooks/directories story we have already had. If you pick up enough poor quality links your ranking will eventually suffer, so not smart for brand sites.

If Earl wants to send me a review copy though, I'd be very happy to see how useful it can be for WH/GH sites ;)

from LtDraper 337 days ago #

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@ChrisLang - the problem is that the search engines can't blanket penalize people for having lots of social media links, even if the footprint is clearly identifiable. What would stop a black hat from creating a social media avatar that did nothing but submit YOUR site to every site available?

The search engines can discount external links, but they can't penalize a site for having external links. I suspect we'll see social media links heavily discounted in the future, so the utility of this type of software will diminish. But you can't deny the short term effectiveness of putting out a bunch of social media links. Drop a link on Digg and you get crawled within the hour.

from NickWilsdon 337 days ago #

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@LtDraper

Ever since Terry over at TW coined the phrase "Google Bowling" we've known it was possible to sabotage a competitor by means of off-page tactics.

Remember when Google changed their webmaster help section from there is "nothing a competitor can do to harm your rankings or have your site removed from our index" to there is "almost nothing".

MattCutts admitted in this Forbes article that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult."

So yes, the ability for negative SEO does exist and if anything has become easier as Google tightens the screws. I even read one well known WH/GH blogger suggest that you test out links by pointing them to a competitor, if they drop rank you keep them there, if nothing happens you switch them across to your own site. It's a win either way. Tounge-in-cheek but shows the mindset now, even outside BH circles.

from YoungMaster 336 days ago #

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Yep, Nick is spot on. The days of external links not having the ability to adversly affect your rankings in the big G are long gone. I have personally seen more than a few sites get slapped for things such as to many sitewides and/or to many links with the exact same anchor text.