WebProNews

Profit motive drives criminals

The profit motive drives spammers to do anything they can to get their offers in front of an audience, because somewhere out there, someone probably will buy into their scams.

Google sees a lot of spam, as their notable antispam engineer Matt Cutts knows. He shared a little bit of what the search advertising company has learned about spam over the years, during his presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Fortunately for people who may have missed him the first time around, Cutts placed a video of his spam presentation on his blog. The fight to reduce its impact comes down to trust and reputation, he noted.

In Google's case, trust comes down to a number of factors, one of which is the well-known PageRank score. That places a weight on a site based on its inbound links, the theory being a more deserving website will earn a lot more links than a spammy one.

Cutts also did something he said he's never gotten around to really doing before with his posts, namely stating search engine optimization done properly is not spam. "This presentation gave me a chance to slip those facts into the minds of several thousand tech-savvy folks," he said, and one slide presented a few guidelines for those seeking SEO help:

• Ask for references and check them
• Make sure they'll tell you exactly what they're doing
• Make sure the SEO abides by search engine guidelines
• Big sites: Tweaking internal linkage, keywords on page
• Smaller sites: Creative ideas for linkbuilding and marketing

Spam poses more than the threat of monetary loss for the unwary. Criminals use it to try and bring malware to people, with the intent of stealing information from them. Why bother trying to sell fake Viagra when you can use a keylogger to grab someone's bank login details, the reasoning goes.

Security software and a little critical thinking about email should help people avoid the problems of spam, from nuisance to malware threat. Spam isn't going away, and that places the burden on people to protect themselves.