

Ask HN: why do spammers target HN? - evancaine

on http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories you see a lot of spam. A small percentage is blog spam with a technical subject matter but the bulk of it is totally unrelated to technology, hackers or business.<p>I'm wondering why the spammers continue to spam this site when there is virtually a zero chance that their submission will make the front page. I'm guessing they don't specifically target HN but instead are using spamming software which posts to various sites in bulk.<p>If that's true, I wonder why the authors included HN in the list of sites to post to.  Are they just taking a shotgun approach and hitting any site they can or is there a method to their madness?
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byoung2
Hacker News is a site that is crawled very often by search engines. Even
though outbound links are nofollowed, the search engines still follow them and
count them as links into a site (they just don't pass pagerank). So the theory
is that if I post a spam link on Hacker News, if it stays up for an hour
before being flagged, that should be enough time for search bots to crawl
their way back to my site.

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pg
I just asked Matt Cutts about this and he says nofollow links don't do
spammers any good at all.

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byoung2
Remember, he doesn't speak for Yahoo and Bing...

And even for Google, there is evidence that nofollow is treated differently
depending on the site:

<http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-twitter-as-a-sitemap>

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andyn
I do feel puzzlement at people submitting utterly unrelated spam to this site.

Partially I suspect there's no need to be choosy if it costs next to nothing
to submit here and partially because having another site linking to the spammy
site is good for SEO.

