Users’ inboxes were flooded with spam Monday, an apparent issue with Microsoft Outlook’s spam filters not working.
According to Mashable, the Twitterverse is ablaze with reports of inboxes filled to the brim with spam messages. The emails ranged from random — but not necessarily harmful — emails to blatant phishing attempts.
There does not appear to be an explanation for the issue, nor is there a time frame for when it will be fixed. Mashable reached out to Microsoft for comment, but has not received a response.
We will update this story as more information becomes available.
T-Mobile and Verizon announced they have both rolled out the STIR/SHAKEN protocols in an effort to fight robocalls and spam.
The STIR/SHAKEN protocols are designed to provide a way for carriers to verify the origin and authenticity of a call, and then pass that verification on to the carrier on the receiving end of the call, who then verifies it again. If the call is verified by all carriers involved, the recipient phone will display a “Caller Verified” badge.
The first and second largest carriers announced they have both completed their STIR/SHAKEN implementation, offering an additional layer of protection to their customers.
“This latest STIR/SHAKEN milestone is a key part of our overall efforts to combat these unwanted calls,” said Ronan Dunne, EVP and CEO of Verizon Consumer Group. “There is always more to be done, but this is yet another important step for the industry and customers should rest assured that we remain vigilant in our efforts to take down the bad guys and protect them.”
“T-Mobile was first to implement number verification in 2019 because protecting customers against scammers and spammers is one of the most important things we can do as an industry,” said Mike Sievert, CEO T-Mobile. “To date, T-Mobile has protected over 80 million customers from more than 33 billion suspect calls – and counting. With the combination of Number Verification, free Caller ID and the scam blocking tools in Scam Shield, and by working with network providers of all sizes, we are providing the industry’s most comprehensive scam and spam protection for free to all our customers and working every day to make scammers jobs impossible.”
The implementation of the protocol is good news for consumers.
Google is preparing to roll out a feature that will help cut down spam calls by verifying calls before they’re placed.
In a support document, Google outlines how Verified Calls will work. Participating businesses will send information to Google’s Verified Calls server, including the name of the business, who they’re calling and the purpose of the call.
Google then sends this information to the Android Phone app. Once the business actually places the call, Android compares the call with the information Google previously sent. If everything matches up, the Phone app displays a “Verified Call” badge.
While certainly an intriguing feature, and one with a lot of potential, it remains to be seen how many users want Google knowing exactly why a business is calling them. For those who want to keep Google from knowing too much about their business, the feature can be turned off.
Mozilla has announced it is working on Private Relay, an email alias generating service designed to protect user privacy.
As more websites and services require email addresses to sign up, customers are often inundated with mailing lists and spam. Even worse, many companies play fast and loose with security, jeopardizing people’s privacy by not protecting their personal information, such as their email address. Some individuals maintain multiple addresses, specifically for the purpose of using one or more for purchases, signups and mailing lists.
Mozilla, a longtime leader in internet privacy, wants to make the whole process a little easier with their Private Relay, a Firefox add-on that will allow users to create an email alias with a single click. The add-on will work with online forms, using the alias in the email field, and then forwarding any email to the person’s real email address. If the alias begins to receive unwanted emails, it can be disabled or deleted.
This is a welcome feature that will make web browsing and email a little more private and secure.
Facebook has admitted to a bug that has been blocking legitimate news about the coronavirus pandemic.
The issue appears to have been related to Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm. Users have been seeing the dreaded “Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam” warning, and a slew of posts to legitimate news articles have been removed.
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, took to Twitter to let users know the problem was being addressed:
We’ve restored all the posts that were incorrectly removed, which included posts on all topics – not just those related to COVID-19. This was an issue with an automated system that removes links to abusive websites, but incorrectly removed a lot of other posts too.
Despite Rosen’s reassurance, many individuals replied to his tweet to say Facebook posts were still being flagged and removed. In some cases, posts were being removed, restored and removed again. Even worse, some users pointed out that there were still plenty of fake news and posts about coronavirus “cures” active, while legitimate articles were being flagged.
Whatever the cause of Facebook’s issue, the company has lost a lot of good will—not that it has a lot left after recent scandals—over this issue at a time when people depend on accurate news and information.
Twitter continues its fight against spam and “tweetdecking” on its platform. On Friday, the social media website suspended a slew of accounts known for stealing and retweeting viral tweets without crediting their original creators.
Included in the suspension are@Dory, @CommonWhit Girl, @memeprovider and a host of other accounts known for stealing jokes and memes from other Twitter users and retweeting them. Twitter had previously suspended some of these accounts individually, but it is the first time that the company suspended them all en masse.
Apparently, stealing other people’s jokes without giving their creators proper credit is just one of the offenses of some of these accounts. According to BuzzFeed, Twitter targeted some of these accountsbecause they are known for “tweetdecking,” a practice where multiple accounts are used in mass-retweeting each other’s posts. The ultimate aim of the practice is to artificially induce these posts to become viral.
At the moment, it is stillunclear if Twitter intends to make these suspensions permanent. What is known, however, is that by engaging in “tweetdecking,” these accounts have violated the company’s policies on spam specifically those that prohibit mass duplication and impersonation. If the social media platform decides to reactivate the suspended accounts, it is likely that repeating their offense will result in more stringent punishments in the future.
Lately, Twitter has come under scrutiny over spamming and fake accounts on its website. Earlier this year, the company released the shocking statistics on its investigations over Russian propaganda campaign via the platform. More than50,000 Twitter accounts were allegedly linked to the Russian government and may have been used to influence the 2016 US presidential elections.
Twitter has deleted 60 of my Followers in less than 24hrs…all of them can’t be Russian-bots.
Under increasing pressure to eliminate spamming, Twitter announced last month that it has anew set of rules on how users and app can automate tweets. Now, third-party platforms such as Tweetdeck can no longer like or send identical tweets from multiple accounts; a move specifically implemented to target “tweetdecking.” The company is also now making greater effort to crack down on the use of bots on its site.
Facebook has rolled out a new update that seeks to cut down on spammy ads on users’ news feeds.
The announcement came just over a month after the social media siteclamped down on fake news and disinformation.
“With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” the blog post, written by Jiun-Ren Lin and Shengbo Guo, said.
This is not a new policy, of course, as engineers at the social media site have been trying to weed out low quality or “disruptive” content from its pages since last year. Tabloid-style headlines, deceptive ads, sexual images, and shocking content are either pushed back down in the feeds or erased altogether.
Facebook utilized machine learning to study the blueprint and models used by spammy ads. With the new algorithm in hand, its AI systems then comb through the billions of posts to find similar patterns.
One of the reasons for Facebook’s aggressive approach toward spammy ads, fake news, and disruptive content was the blowback that Mark Zuckerberg received from critics who accused the social media company of influencing the U.S. elections last November.
Zuckerberg initiallyhedged, but immediately introduced measures to insulate the platform from being a harbinger of fake news and disinformation. In February, the billionaire released a manifesto where he reiterated the company’s original vision of building a community to bring the world closer together.
In this manifesto, he revealed that they were working on machine learning to flag videos and photos that are deemed to be controversial. The Facebook team will then review the content before allowing it to be seen on users’ news feeds. “Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: Are we building the world we all want?” Zuckerberg wrote.
Greg Marra, the company’s product manager for news feed,said the system is not perfect, but the initial results have been encouraging. Below are some of the criteria Facebook’s machines are looking at to categorize a specific content as low-quality or disruptive:
Does it have a “significant amount of original content?”
Are there pop-up ads on the landing pages?
Are the ads shocking or sexual?
Marra said their algorithms will skip over some ads if they are “high-quality” enough that people wouldn’t mind seeing them when they do click on a sponsored content in their news feeds.
Yahoo will face a class action lawsuit related to unwanted text messages it allegedly sent to Sprint customers. According to reports, the company was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to face the suit, which claims it sent unsolicited messages to over 500,000 customers, who could potentially be part of the class.
The messages in question were “welcome” messages received when other users sent customers separate messages using Yahoo Messenger. The lawsuit maintains that Yahoo’s welcome messages are unauthorized advertising for Yahoo and violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
If Yahoo loses the case, it’s looking at damages of up to $1,500 per message.
Back in October, a federal judge ruled that Yahoo would not have to face a class-action suit for violating the TCPA when Rafael David Sherman and Susan Pathman sought it, but the company’s luck changed this week with the suit brought by Rachel Johnson.
According to Reuters, which first reported on the news, the judge declined to certify a separate class of T-Mobile customers for similar messages, claiming that these messages were consented to.
Google announced that it has begun rolling out a series of algorithmic changes aimed at better handling hacked spam in search results. The company says it is “aggressively” targeting hacked spam to protect users and webmasters alike.
“A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.,” says Google software engineer Ning Song. “Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked. This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.”
Google says as it rolls out the new algorithms, users will notice that for some queries, only the “most relevant” results are shown, reducing the amount of results shown altogether.
“This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future,” says Song. “We are continuing tuning our systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the organic, legitimate results.”
The updates will eventually impact about 5% of queries (depending on language), Google says.
Google is not cool with you frequently violating their guidelines. Well, obviously they’re not cool with you violating them at all, but they do give second chances. If you screw up and get slapped with a manual penalty, you can fix the issue and file a reconsideration request, and get back into Google’s good graces.
This will only go so far, however. If Google accepts your reconsideration request, and you keep violating guidelines after that, it’s not going to be so easy (if it was even easy in the first place) the next time.
That’s the gist of a message Google is sending webmasters. The company’s search quality team wrote a short blog post on the subject, urging webmasters to take its guidelines seriously. It says:
In order to protect the quality of our search results, we take automated and manual actions against sites that violate our Webmaster Guidelines. When your site has a manual action taken, you can confirm in the [Manual Actions] page in Search Console which part of your site the action was taken and why. After fixing the site, you can send a reconsideration request to Google. Many webmasters are getting their manual action revoked by going through the process.
However, some sites violate the Webmaster Guidelines repeatedly after successfully going through the reconsideration process. For example, a webmaster who received a Manual Action notification based on an unnatural link to another site may nofollow the link, submit a reconsideration request, then, after successfully being reconsidered, delete the nofollow for the link. Such repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve. Especially when the repeated violation is done with a clear intention to spam, further action may be taken on the site.
Long story short, don’t violate the Webmaster Guidelines. If you do for some reason, and you get caught, and action is taken against your site, don’t keep violating them once you get your site back in the game. You’ll get caught again, and you’re going to have a much harder time getting your rankings back.
If you need a refresher, you can find the guidelines here. Read it over, and know what Google considers spam.
Two things are true about LinkedIn emails. First, like any company that sends automated emails, there’s a way to unsubscribe and/or turn down the volume.
Of course, ain’t nobody got time for that, which brings me to the second thing about LinkedIn emails – holy hell there’s a lot of them.
LinkedIn knows that this is a running joke. What’s harder to hide from? LinkedIn or the NSA?
This might be about to change, if LinkedIn is to be believed.
“Many of you have told us that you receive too many emails from LinkedIn. We’re also not immune to the late night talk show host jokes. We get it. And we’ve recently begun to make changes so that the emails you receive are more infrequent and more relevant,” says LinkedIn’s Aatif Awan in a recent blog post.
According to LinkedIn, consolidating connection invitations and group updates, among other things, have helped reduced the amount of emails it’s sending by 40 percent. Have you noticed a difference?
Of course, we have to be fair to LinkedIn. Yes, it’s been a bit heavy on the send button for many years, but there is also this to consider:
“We also want to remind you that we provide the ability to control which emails you want to receive at your desired frequency. All of our emails have an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and you can visit your Settings page to manage your email experience to your liking.”
“We also want to remind you” is LinkedIn’s way of saying hey, stop bitching and take five seconds to update your email settings.
When the Duggar’s show 19 Kids and Counting was finally officially cancelled by TLC, fans of the show were livid. They took to comment sections of blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages by the score to vent their displeasure that their favorite show had fallen victim to its bad press.
While the Duggar family may not be perfect and they’ve had difficulties like so many other families, their show WAS one of the few clean, family-friendly shows on TV. Sadly, there isn’t much a family can watch together any longer. The airwaves are full of terrible, trashy television! It isn’t right that the Duggars must be forced off the air while the filthy shows remain!
We want our voices to be heard! We all know the power of standing together—just ask A&E what happened when they cancelled Duck Dynasty!
It seems that every day in America our values and way of life are disappearing. We must all stand together.
Please complete the petition form below to tell the Duggar Family we support them and to tell TLC that we want the Duggars back on the air!
There is then a simple form where fans can enter their name, state, and email address.
Just a side note: Duck Dynasty was never canceled. Phil Robertson was suspended from the show, but it was never termed as permanent, and he was brought back.
But there is a bigger concern with this site.
Why wasn’t this petition hosted somewhere like change.org, where many such petitions are started and seen? In fact, a petition hosted there got almost 200,000 supporters asking for 19 Kids and Counting to be canceled. Others there, asking for the show to be brought back, have 500+ supporters.
The site, though, is hosted at Godaddy and registered through a service called Domains by Proxy, which many use to keep their ownership of a site anonymous. Nothing shocking there.
But a look at the “fine print” terms you have to agree to in order to submit your name as wanting the Duggars back on TV.
I knowingly and voluntarily add my name and other personal information to this petition. I understand that, by doing so, I am indicating my support for both 19 Kids and Counting and the Duggar family. I am over 18 years old and agree that any personal information collected through this site, including, without limitation, my name, geographic location, email and/or support for 19 Kids and Counting and/or the Duggar family, may be shared with TLC and/or other third parties for any purpose; and that such parties may use such information in any manner, including, without limitation, to communicate with me.
By signing the petition, you give permission for the anonymous owner of this site, which was wholly unnecessary in the first place, to collect your information and sell it to anyone they wish.
If this was a legitimate effort to get the 19 Kids and Counting show back on television, why would that be a requirement? Does the wording of these terms sound like a simple fan wanting their show back on?
People and businesses that spam or buy/sell email addresses. Try again. Desperate actions don't equal my business for quality services.
— Feminine by Design (@LaFemmebyDesign) May 18, 2015
Email spam levels have reached a twelve-year low according to research from Symantec.
The company released its June Intelligence Report looking at targeted attacks and phishing, vulnerabilities, malware, mobile and social media, and of course spam.
“There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape,” it says. “According to our metrics, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent. This is the first time this rate has fallen below 50 percent of email for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was clear back in September of 2003.”
The mining sector had the highest spam rate at over 56%.
All organization sizes had around a 52-53% spam rate according to the study, but those with 251-500 employees had the highest rate at 53.2%.
“Phishing rates and email-based malware were also down this month,” the summary says. “However, there were 57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware created in May and 29.2 million in April. This increase in activity lends more evidence to the idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply moving to other areas of the threat landscape”
After looking at over 10.2 million accounts and studying the behavior of 20,000 purchased fake accounts, some Italian researchers have concluded that Instagram still has a bot problem.
This, despite a concerted effort on Instagram’s part to purge such accounts from the network.
This past December, Instagram announced an effort to get rid of “fake and spammy accounts.”
“As more people join, keeping Instagram authentic is critical—it’s a place where real people share real moments. We’re committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web, and that’s why we’re finishing up some important work that began earlier this year. We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to improve your experience. As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts. This means that some of you will see a change in your follower count,” said Instagram at the time.
“Despite that last December purge and new ‘countermeasures’ to curb this trend, there is still a lack of transparency about internal data and very few analysis on the actual presence of spambots, especially on Instagram. Now that ‘anybody can advertise on the platform,’ and the company is set to ‘become a real business,’ it is crucial to create a level playing field for everybody – and also to show more respect for users that flock social media platforms,” reads the report.
Social networks with bot problems could also, unsurprisingly, face ad problems. Marketers want to know that they are paying for real eyes, not a bot’s. That’s why you’ve seen social networks like Facebook and Twitter downplay their fake account problems for some time.
The research also found that 19.8 percent of the accounts analyzed never posted, 10% only posted once in a month, about half of the accounts had fewer than five posts.
The report claims that 30% of users are “inactive”, meaning one or zero posts in a month. Instagram disputes this, saying “active” means logging on. Instagram has a point here, as plenty of users like looking at Instagram without actually posting themselves.
Just like Facebook, Instagram uses automated and manual measures to curb the bot problem. But as long as it’s super easy (and it most certainly is) to buy and sell fake accounts and likes, this will continue to be a problem.
It’s not news that spam plagues social media, but Networked Insights (via Marketing Land) recently put out some research looking into how it affects brands, and the conclusion is that data is pretty “dirty”.
According to the report, 9% of all Twitter users who tweet in English are non-consumers. That’s not just spammers, but includes bots, celebrities, brand handles, and inactive accounts. Spam is a bigger problem on blogs and forums, where 28% of all posts are written by non-consumers, it finds. Still, over 90% of social media posts in conversations around some brands are classified as spam.
Brands today are becoming more sophisticated about analyzing social media to discover consumer insights. But, if social data is filled with spam, brands’ analyses will not be accurate or actionable,” the report says. “The industry recognizes data is inherently dirty. According to a recent New York Times article, 50% to 80% of a data scientist’s time now involves cleaning data. Efforts are being made to clean up social spam, but it’s an uphill battle. Twitter is actively finding and removing social bots, But, according to the Wall Street Journal, the black market is able to create fake accounts quicker than Twitter can remove them.”
The report defines social spam as including tweets, reviews, or blog comments, which contain coupons, product listings, contests/giveaways, adult content, or general spam, which may contain “gibberish or nonsense”.
Older forms of social media like forums and blogs are still the heaviest sources of social spam, based on the report’s findings.
Different categories have different percentages of spam posts, with the most appearing for the shopping (13%), finance (11%), and technology (10%) categories compared to real estate (7%), automotive (6%), pets (6%), sports (1%), science (1%), and religion (1%).
“There are branded posts and conversations about brand names happening across social media all the time,” the report says. “Although overall spam rates are less than 10% across social media platforms, conversations for some brands are dominated by spam.”
Elizabeth Arden and Rite Aid are among the brands being dominated by spam, each with 95% of posts about them falling under the label. Other troubled brands include Visa (81%), MasterCard (76%), Ulta (75%), American Eagle Outfitters (73%), Best Buy (72%), Fisher-Price (70%), Lancome (68%), and Victorinox (68%).
The main takeaway from the report is that when you detect and remove all the spam from brand conversations, the conversations look very different. For example, when they removed the spam from the food and drink category, they found “more nuanced conversations” about healthy food, food cravings, etc. This would enable brands to better interpret what consumers are really talking about.
Once you’re able to eliminate (or at least cut drastically) the spam noise out of the data, you can focus on legitimate data, which you can then use to personalize your marketing, which is key to increasing brand loyalty.
Doorway pages have historically been known as pages created specifically to get in search results for various queries, and then send users to a different page. Here’s Google’s instant answer for what they are:
This practice has long been against Google’s quality guidelines, but that’s hardly stopped people from trying it. In 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts advised people not to hire an “assclown SEO that makes doorway pages with sneaky redirects,” and that advice still holds up today, apparently more than ever.
Five years ago, Google started sending webmasters messages when Webmaster Tools detected doorway pages on their sites.
“We have a long-standing view that doorway pages that [are] created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user’s search experience,” says Brian White from Google’s Webspam team. “For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site. So if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.”
Google has “freshened” its definition of doorway pages in the Quality Guidelines. It’s not exactly the same as the definition from the Wikipedia-based instant answer, so this is the one you’ll really want to pay attention to:
Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.
Here are some examples of doorways:
Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
Remember when Google launched the Panda update, and gave webmasters a list of questions they could ask themselves to determine if a page is high quality? Well, they’ve provided a list of questions to determine if your pages may be seen as doorway pages now. Luckily this list isn’t as long:
Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
I think this is mostly common sense stuff for those familiar with Google’s guidance throughout the years, but it never hurts to have clear, concise language to refer to. Some must have been having success with this type of content anyway to have Google implement a new ranking adjustment.
“Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their ‘search footprint’ without adding clear, unique value,” says White. “These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof.”
According to White, sites with “large and well-established doorway campaigns” may notice a significant impact from the adjustment.
It’s nice to see Google announcing algorithm changes these days. They don’t always do that. There for a while, they were releasing monthly lists of changes, but eventually stopped doing so, claiming people had grown bored with them.
Last month, Google announced that a new mobile ranking signal had gone in to effect, and that another one would take hold in April.
Spam has historically been a problem on Pinterest, but it’s becoming less of one, according to the company. That’s a good thing considering that it’s now getting into monetization, and offering advertising options.
Pinterest shared some new stats on its spam fighting efforts as well as some information on new technology it’s developing to “keep Pinners’ accounts safe and secure.”
“The Pinterest spam team (called the BlackOps team) has been developing unique technology to out-scale spammers called Stingray, a distributed stream processor and rule engine,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells WebProNews. “They’ve also added a strong integration test environment and comprehensive monitoring across the system over the last six months to speedily and easily detect problems.”
Perhaps to show how seriously Pinterest is really taking spam fighting, they made a short film about it featuring a great deal of robot combat (including one with Wolverine claws, which are used to stab a spam robot through the face).
Seriously, who would take the time to make this if they weren’t serious?
“We’ve made major gains in our operational strategy faster than ever before, and in just a few months,” the spokesperson says. “We can dismantle entire attacks in milliseconds, whereas a year ago it would have taken hours to one day. Our system responds twice as fast to internal spam requests. The number of Pinners who click on spam has dropped in half (from few to even fewer). Our system’s ability to successfully respond to bad behavior improved from 95 percent to 99.99 percent.”
There have been plenty of articles written about spam on Pinterest over the years.
“Spammers set up bogus accounts, hundreds or thousands of them (though Pinterest tries to prevent this) using automated software and then ‘follow’ you in the hope you’ll follow them back, thereby seeing images of whatever it is they’re promoting,” says one from ScamBusters.org. “They may also hack your account by discovering your password, either on Pinterest or elsewhere if you have used the same one on multiple sites, and post their images directly on your page.”
A post on the Tailwind Blog a little over a year ago said, “Ever since it’s 2010 launch, Pinterest has been seen as an easy target by spammers. With help from spam-bots (which are sadly readily available for purchase online) spammers were able to pin thousands of fake links everyday. While spamming may seem pointless to most of us on the site, spammers can make serious cash for their efforts…Thanks to affiliate programs through sites likes Amazon, thousands of spammers flooded Pinterest, seeing it as a simple target for fast cash.”
In early 2012, Pinterest had already begun cracking down on Amazon affiliate link pinning, and earlier this month, the company put a stop to links from other networks, upsetting some users who had been making money that way. Rival Keep saw this as an opportunity to attract some users by inviting them to pin their affiliate links on its service.
Pinterest’s spam problem made a lot of headlines in 2012, particularly when The Daily Dot ran a story about a spammer that claimed to be making $1,000 a day using thousands of spambots. At the time of that article, Pinterest had only deleted one of them.
“Pinterest is by FAR the easiest social network to spam right now,” the spammer said at the time, after noting that he had also spammed Facebook and Twitter. “Quite possibly the easiest ever to spam. It requires almost no work to get started and no money to invest. You just have to know how the system works and how you can fix it to your advantage.”
“I started on Feb. 20, 2012. Pinterest used to use a script called Skimlinks,” he explained. “What this did was when anything was pinned that had any type of affiliate link involved, Skimlinks would replace your affiliate tag with theirs. This caused a lot of bad press and outrage and they did away with it. That’s when I saw the opportunity for easy money.”
In case you’re wondering why the spammer would reveal himself if he was so successful, he also told The Daily Dot that he had a stockpile of accounts waiting to be put to use once the ones he was using were deleted. He said that others were doing what he was doing, but not on the same scale.
The day after that story ran, a Pinterest spokesperson told Marketing Land, “As a growing service, Pinterest is not immune to challenges faced by sites across the web, including spam. However, it is a tremendous priority for us to quickly address them. Our engineers are actively working to manage issues as they arise and are revisiting the nature of public feeds on the site to make it harder for fake or harmful content to get into them.”
A few months later, Kairay Media, which said, “While there are already existing anti-spam measures that Pinterest has implemented, it is still questionable whether these methods really catch most spammers’ activities or not,” looked at some key differences between spambots and real users on Pinterest.
Most bots, it said, had neither followers nor followings on their Pinterest accounts, and when they followers, these were typically other spam bots. They would also often display suspect Twitter accounts, which also had neither followers nor followings. Sometimes they wouldn’t even have tweets. The Pinterest accounts also would often not have descriptions on their profiles, and they would have generic board names and pins that don’t match their boards.
To report a pin, simply click the flag icon after clicking to see the pin close up. Choose a reason for the report, and that’s pretty much it. To report an actual user, go to the person’s profile, click the gear menu, and then “Report”. Again, choose the reason and confirm. You can also report comments with the flag icon that appears to the right.
To block a user, go to their profile, click the gear menu, click Report, and then click “Block”.
In 2013, Pinterest tightened up its guidlines on contests in order to prevent that kind of spam. Contests are okay if they’re done right, but Pinterest doesn’t allow those that: suggest Pinterest sponsors or endorses them; require people to pin from a selection; make people pin contest rules; run a sweepstakes where each pin, board, like or follow represents an entry; encourage spammy behavior like asking for comments; ask to vote with pins, boards or likes; or require a minimum number of pins.
“Even if your contest follows the rules, we encourage you to ask whether it’s the best experience for Pinners,” wrote Pinterest’s Kevin Knight in a blog post. “If you do decide to run a contest, make sure it complies with all our contest rules. And remember: contests are just a tactic and shouldn’t replace a long-term Pinterest strategy.”
Contests are a common social media marketing tactic, though it’s gotten harder to successfully execute these campaigns in some places. There are plenty of ways to legitimately use Pinterest for marketing. As the second leading driver of social media traffic referrals to websites (according to Shareaholic), it might even be foolish not to use it.
Optimizing for Pinterest’s continuously improving Guided Search and utilizing Rich Pins would be good places to start.
“Guided Search allows for businesses and marketers to see what other topics or products people may be interested in,” long-time Pinterest marketer Vincent Ng told us in a recent interview. “For example, you may be in the business of selling wedding dresses, but you’re not too sure what dresses are popular. When you use Guided Search, it tells us that people are looking for princess wedding dresses, vintage wedding dresses, and lace wedding dresses and so much more. Now you can create boards and pins around those specific topics and keywords. You don’t have to guess what people want. Guided Search will tell you what people want.”
“Rich pins for a blogger is a must, because rich pins are a factor in search rankings for Pinterest,” he said. “Pinterest prefers to show blog posts or pins that are rich pins. On top of that, rich pins also have more credibility and authority because rich pins for articles show off, in bold text, the title of the blog post article and the meta description when clicked through.”
He said he worked with one blog which saw traffic more than double two days after implementing Rich Pins.
For additional non-spammy Pinterest marketing ideas, I urge you to read that article. Also have a look at these considerations for Pinterest SEO. Just don’t think you can go spamming Pinterest’s search engine either.
Another helpful tip that marketers may want to keep in mind is that you’ll want to avoid using shortened URLs on Pinterest. As Marekting Land reported a couple years ago, these aren’t allowed.
“We want to be able to show users where a pin leads. Unfortunately, bit.ly/xyz doesn’t tell them much,” Pinterest’s Barry Schnitt told the publication. “We want to be able to offer users more relevant content from a site (and more distribution for the site) by suggesting other pins from a site. Again, we can do that for marketingland.com but not for bit.ly. Unfortunately, we’ve found that bad guys out there abuse redirects and URL shorteners to send people to malicious sites.”
The article does say that sites that have their own branded short URLs can submit a request to be whitelisted.
Last week, Pinterest released some new guidance on what works best for businesses when it comes to pins and boards. The company performed three studies, analyzing over 100,000 pins to see how differences in things like background and text affect clicks and repins. The main takeaways Pinterest highlighted are that great pins are “helpful,” “beautiful,” and/or “tasteful”.
The following videos elaborate, and are little more helpful than that:
We summed those up here if you don’t feel like sitting through them. Also check out Pinterest’s guide to making great pins here.
Spam is an ongoing problem for Pinterest. Eight months ago, Pinterest spam was in the headlines again as the social network had been hacked, with large numbers of accounts “spewing weight loss-related messages,” as TheNextWeb reported.
A spokesperson told that publication, “The security of Pinners is a top priority. We were alerted to some instances of spam and responded by immediately placing impacted accounts in safe mode, and reaching out to Pinners as we solved the issue. We’re constantly working on ways to keep Pinners safe through reactive and proactive steps, as well as educating them on the importance of using complex and unique passwords.”
Hopefully Pinterest’s new “Stingray” system is as efficient as the robots in its short film.
“Stingray is a distributed stream processor and rule engine that enables us to react to known malicious behavior in milliseconds,” explains Marty Weiner from Pinterest’s BlackOps spam-fighting team. “We can even pre-empt attacks if they match signatures along hundreds of different dimensions and stop the attack before it starts. Because we architected Stingray with certain fundamental distributed systems guarantees, we’ll soon be able to write a rule and easily apply it in the past completely annihilating an attack and the mess it leaves.”
Pinterest is also apparently looking to hire in its BlackOps unit, so it appears this will be a continued area of focus. As the company looks to bring on more advertisers and prepares to launch a rumored “Buy” button, that’s certainly a good thing.
If you recently awoke to find you now have significantly fewer followers on Instagram than you once had – get used to it. They’re likely not coming back.
Instagram has just initiated a purge of sorts – an attempt to rid the network of fake and spammy accounts.
…As more people join, keeping Instagram authentic is critical—it’s a place where real people share real moments. We’re committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web, and that’s why we’re finishing up some important work that began earlier this year.
We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to improve your experience. As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts. This means that some of you will see a change in your follower count.
Most of you won’t see any impact. If you’re one of those who will see a correction, you will receive a notification in the app directing you to additional information.
While the average Instagram user probably didn’t see too much of a dip (unless they were in the habit of buying fake followers), some high-profile accounts saw a giant dive in follower counts.
Based on data collected over at 64px.com, the top loser when it comes to followers is Instagram itself. The official Instagram account lost nearly 19 million followers , nearly 30 percent of its total base.
Big celebrities like Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, and Kim Kardashian were also affect by Instagram’s crackdown on illegitimate accounts. They lost 5.7%, 7%, 3.7%, and 5.5% of their follower base, respectively.
But nobody was hit like Justin Bieber. Apparently, he had the most fake followers of all. The recent purge axed over 3.5 million of his followers, a nearly 15 percent drop.
I know it looks good to have more followers, but come on. Do you really want a bunch of spambots as followers? Does that really make you feel good?
Instagram has just announced a significant milestone – 300 million users. The company says that its user base now shares over 70 million photos and videos every day and CEO Kevin Systrom says that 70 percent is international.
Alongside this milestone announcement, Instagram is also unveiling a few changes to the app.
First off, the company is finally making the long-overdue move to start verifying users. The verification will come in the form of blue badges beside usernames, and will let you know that the account you’re following is the actual account of the celebrity or brand in question. Twitter, Facebook, and even Google+ have all had verification for some time now – so it’s about time Instagram jumped on board.
And as is the deal with those other social networks, Instagram is not taking verification requests. “Right now, only some public figures, celebrities and brands have verified badges. It’s not currently possible to request a verified badge,” says the company.
Also, as Facebook and Twitter have done in the past, Instagram is making a move to permanently delete fake and spam accounts. According to the company, your follower count may suffer because of this move – but it shouldn’t be a huge deal.
Finally, as more people join, keeping Instagram authentic is critical—it’s a place where real people share real moments. We’re committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web, and that’s why we’re finishing up some important work that began earlier this year.
We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to improve your experience. As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts. This means that some of you will see a change in your follower count.
Most of you won’t see any impact. If you’re one of those who will see a correction, you will receive a notification in the app directing you to additional information.
Instagram’s impressive user growth comes as the company is making a very serious push to become the next big advertising space.
It’s not 100% clear yet, but it’s looking like for webmasters and SEOs, the era of Matt Cutts is a thing of the past. His career at Google may continue, but it doesn’t sound like he’ll be the head of webspam going forward.
Would you like to see Matt Cutts return to the role he’s held for years, or do you look forward to change in the search department? Share your thoughts in the comments.
It’s a pretty interesting time in search right now. Matt Cutts, who has been the go-to guy for webmaster help and Q&A related to Google search for quite a few years, has been on leave from the company since July. Meanwhile, his counterpart over at Bing has been let go from his duties at Microsoft.
@DuaneForrester sending you good thoughts today. Thanks for providing info to so many people and tough love when needed.
When Cutts announced his leave, he didn’t really make it sound like he wouldn’t be back, but rather like he would be taking a nice,long, much-deserved vacation. He wrote on his blog:
I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.
So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.
Scheduled to be gone through October. See? Pretty much sounds like a vacation. As you know, October has since come and gone. On October 31, Cutts provided another update, saying he was extending his leave, and wouldn’t be back at Google this year.
Ok, fine. Cutts has been at Google for fourteen years, and can probably take a considerable amount of time off with no problem. But he’d be back in the swing of things in the new year, right? Well, he might be back, but what he’ll be doing remains to be seen.
Cutts appeared on the web chat show This Week in Google, hosted by Leo Laporte, who asked him if he’ll go back to the same role, or if this is a chance for him to try something different. This part of the conversation starts at about 9 minutes and 50 seconds in to the video below (h/t: Search Engine Roundtable).
“Well, I really have been impressed with how well everyone else on the team is doing, and it’s created a little bit of an opportunity for them to try new things, explore different stuff, you know, approach problems from a different way, and so we’ll have to see how it goes,” Cutts responded. “I loved the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on what important news was happening related to Google, but you know, it’s not clear that having me as a lightning rod, you know for, you know unhappy black hat SEOs or something is the best use of anybody’s time compared to working on other things that could be making the world better for Google or in general. So we’ll see how it all works.”
It doesn’t really sounds like he intends to go back to the classic Matt Cutts role. In fact, later in the discussion, he referred to the initial leave as the “official” leave, implying that the one he’s now on is open-ended.
Laporte asked him if he has the ability at the company to just do something different if he wants to.
He said, “The interesting thing is that at Google they try to get you and go do different projects, so the product managers, they encourage you to rotate every two or three years, and so it’s relatively rare to find people who have been around forever in a specific area. You’ll find Amit [Singhal] in search, Sridhar [Ramaswamy], you know, some of these people that are really, really senior, you know – higher ranking than me for sure – they do stick around in one area, but a lot of other people jump to different parts of the company to furnish different skills and try different things, which is a pretty good idea, I think.”
Again, it sounds like he would really like to do something different within the company.
He also reiterated his confidence in the current webspam team. On his “colleagues” (he prefers that term to “minions”), he said, “I just have so much admiration for you know, for example, last year, there was a real effort on child porn because of some stuff that happened in the United Kingdom, and a lot of people chipped in, and that is not an easy job at all. So you really have to think hard about how you’re gonna try to tackle this kind of thing.”
Jeff Jarvis, who was also on the show, asked Cutts what other things interest him.
Cutts responded, “Oh man, I was computer graphics and actually inertial trackers and accelerometers in grad school. At one point I said, you know, you could use commodity hardware, but as a grad student, you don’t have access to influence anybody’s minds, so why don’t I just go do something else for ten years, and somebody else will come up with all these sensors, and sure enough, you’ve got Kinect, you have the Wii, you know, the iPhone. Now everybody’s got a computer in their pocket that can do 3D sensing as long as write the computer programs well. So there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you could do.”
Will we see Matt working on the Android team? As a matter of fact, Laporte followed that up by mentioning Andy Rubin – the guy who created Android and brought it to Google – leaving the company. News of that came out last week.
Matt later said, “I’ll always have a connection and soft spot for Google…”
That’s actually a bit more mysterious of a comment. I don’t want to put any words in the guy’s mouth, but to me, that sounds like he’s not married to the company for the long haul.
Either way, webmasters are already getting used to getting updates and helpful videos from Googlers like Pierre Far and John Mueller. We’ve already seen Google roll out new Panda and Penguin updates since Cutts has been on leave, and the SEO world hasn’t come crumbling down.
I’m guessing Cutts is getting less hate mail these days. He must have been getting tired of disgruntled website owners bashing him online all the time. It’s got to be nice to not have to deal with that all the time.
As I said at the beginning of the article, it’s really not clear what Matt’s future holds, so all we can really do is listen to what he’s said, and look for him to update people further on his plans.
In the meantime, if you miss him, you can peruse the countless webmaster videos and comments he’s made over the years that we’ve covered here.
Do you expect Matt Cutts to return to search in any capacity? Do you expect him to return to Google? Should he? Do you miss him already? Let us know what you think.
Facebook revealed on Friday that it has obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers, and talked extensively about how it won’t put up with fake likes and other spam on its network.
The company says it’s honoring Cyber Security Awareness Month by discussing how it is fighting spam, and giving tips to users for “authentic interactions”.
Facebook’s Matt Jones writes in a blog post, “Most people rarely come into contact with spam or other low quality content on Facebook, but we’re constantly working to make our service even better. It’s important to remember that fraudulent activity is bad for everyone — including Page owners, advertisers, Facebook and people on our platform. We adapt our defenses constantly to stay ahead of spammers’ techniques, and one area we’ve focused on for several years is fake likes. We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results, not fakes. Businesses won’t achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they’re connected to aren’t real. It’s in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.”
“The spammers behind fake likes have one goal — to make money off of Page owners without delivering any value in return. They make their profit by promising and generating likes to Facebook Page administrators who typically don’t understand that fake likes won’t help them achieve their business goals,” Jones says. “Fake like peddlers tempt Page admins with offers to ‘buy 10,000 likes!’ or other similar schemes. To deliver those likes, the scammers often try to create fake accounts, or in some cases, even hack into real accounts in order to use them for sending spam and acquiring more likes. Since these fraudulent operations are financially motivated businesses, we focus our energy on making this abuse less profitable for the spammers.”
Tips for authentic interactions Facebook gives include not buying fraudulent likes, focusing on key business objectives, and being cautious to avoid infecting your computer with malware. Each of these, as well as Facebook’s general approach to “site integrity,” is discussed further in the post if you want to dive in.
