Spamvertising is the practice of sending E-mail spam

E-mail spam

Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...

, advertising a website. The word is a portmanteau of the words "spam

Spam (electronic)

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...

" and "advertising

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

".

It also refers to vandalizing wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s, blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s and online forums with hyperlink

Hyperlink

In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...

s in order to get a higher search engine ranking for the vandal's website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

. Spamvertisers insert links to their websites (typically, sites purporting to sell some commercial product) and add keyword

Keyword (Internet search)

An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the...

s of common or related searches. The apparent goal is that a search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 will find the vandalized page full of links and improve the popularity rating of the pages to which they link. This is typically done by automated editing programs which look for editable text fields in web forms and automatically fill them in with web links. The links typically lead to pills, porn and poker

Pills, porn and poker

Pills, porn and poker, the so-called 3 Ps, are the most common forms of business which use E-mail spam and other forms of spamvertising. In many cases, these sites are of dubious legality, and are often fronts for fraud....

 sites.

Most legitimate website providers do not tolerate this practice, and will delete any site that has been spamvertised.

This practice has led to many editable online resources employing anti-spam countermeasures, including the use of captcha

CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...

s to prevent automated editing.

See also

• Referrer spam
• Spam (electronic)
  Spam (electronic)
  Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
  
  
• Wikipedia Signpost article on the nofollow tag
• Wikipedia guidelines for acceptable external links
• nofollow
  Nofollow
  nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index...
  
  

External links

• The website Chongqed.org maintains a list of spamvertisers
• http://spamvertised.abusebutler.com This site tracks the volume of URLs (links to websites) advertised via spam email messages, provides real-time and archived lists of spammers domains.
• BlockAlert provides a view of spam and spamvertising within IP block hierarchy.