Manipulating Del.icio.us with Spam
Recently I looked at ways to manipulate a site’s Alexa Ranking. Now Rob at BusinessPundit is taking manipulation to the next web level with his post on Manipulating Del.icio.us.
It’s less of a how-to post than the Alexa one, but gives an example of a Hoodia site spamming the business tag section of del.icio.us and wonders how del.icio.us will fight such obvious spam.
Today, I noticed someone had tagged something for Hoodia. I have no idea what Hoodia does and I don’t care. I just know that every website I run gets spammed with Hoodia crap. I thought to myself “what kind of weirdo is tagging Hoodia sites,” so I clicked on arctic99’s profile and was surprised to see that all he tagged was Hoodia sites. Not only that, but he tagged the same damn site over and over.
Now, I probably shouldn’t even be writing this because it will just give him traffic, but I’m compelled to expose this because it really aggravates me. The great thing about the web is that it is free and open. But the same thing that makes it great allows people to manipulate it.
What can be done? Should del.icio.us delete his account and make him start over? I don’t know. To be honest, it is doubtful that his campaign has been very successful. Surely the del.icio.us/popular algorithm ignores multiple tags on the same site from the same person.
So, how much will spam stink up social media and its tranformation into search? Probably not any more than search spam currently does!
