Another way to make money from spam

[rconner]

Interesting post at KnujOn -- They're alleging that some spammers are using spam to pump up the apparent hit rates of obscure domains so that these can be "flipped" for big bucks. The article is a bit elliptical, but I am assuming that the spammer might use some of these domains as image drops or the like, so that each successful spam delivery would rack up a few hits in the domain's log files (providing "proof" of the domain's "popularity").

What do domain resellers have to do with your spam? Domain reseller are speculators in the domain name market. Domains have become a currency unto themselves, like stocks, the value of a domain name goes up and down. Some companies buy and hold thousands of domain names and trade them when the price goes up. Sometimes the Registrars and resellers have auctions for domain names. spam fits into the picture when it comes to valuing a domain name. Domains that have value often do because there is great interest or perceived interest. Interest can be artificially increased through click fraud and spam which can change the number of times a particular domain was visited. In the case of a domain no one has ever hear of, like mkxt.com, as site that has no content making in relatively invisible to search engines, the only real way to get visitors to the site in order to inflate the value is through spam. In fact, the next domain featured in the spam sample above is aeha.com which is being offered for $4,825.00.

-- rick

[Farelf]

Interesting post at KnujOn -- They're alleging that some spammers are using spam to pump up the apparent hit rates of obscure domains so that these can be "flipped" for big bucks. The article is a bit elliptical, but I am assuming that the spammer might use some of these domains as image drops or the like, so that each successful spam delivery would rack up a few hits in the domain's log files (providing "proof" of the domain's "popularity").

Hmm - killing two birds with one stone, why not? Gotta keep moving forward or you're going backwards. Anyway, enough of my cliches already. Hadn't heard of this one before but I'm not surprised. There's a reason the exact phrase "black hat SEO" pulls about 316,000 hits on Google. The little devils are nothing if not inventive. And unprincipled. And in the world of SEO, URBL entries are quite irrelevant. Interesting indeed.