What is link spam?
People doing business on the web want their sites to show up as high as possible on the results of a search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines for relevant keywords. To achieve that goal, some will provide good content and services, others will simply pull dirty tricks.
Link spam is such a dirty trick. The more other sites link to a given site, the higher search engines will rank that site. If you can't get people to link to you, you can simply go ahead and set those links yourself. This is most easily accomplished using web resources where you can post any kind of content, such as on wikis, in blog comments, and in guest books.
What is a wiki?
A regular webpage can be edited by only a few people. They are responsible for keeping all the information up to date. And of course they are responsible for putting all the information online in the first place. On a wiki site, everybody can create and edit pages. Anyone can contribute his knowledge and talent for the greater benefit of the community. This principle led to the existence of many valuable resources, most notably the wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that features an incredible amount of articles on any kind of subjects in incredibly many languages.
What is a blog?
A blog is an online diary. In recent years blogging has become more and more popular as more and more people try to share their views and experiences with the internet community. Many blogs give you the possibility to leave a comment, and thus many blogs can be contributed to by anyone.
Wiki Spam? Blog Spam?
The opportunity to contribute content to wikis and blogs, gave certain people the idea that they could leave links to their own web sites in many places. Since Google and many other search engines will determine the order of their results for a search by the number of links that point to a website, having links to your web site in many places will place your web site on top of the results.
Thus most all wikis and blogs have experienced acts of spamming. Spammers will leave a link to their own site on the wiki. The more spammers hit a wiki, the less useful the wiki becomes since the real information will be buried amongst all the links. That's why the people that contribute to wikis regularily clean away the spam. But the spammers keep coming back.
Why should I care?
If you have found this page using a search engine, you must have entered a keyword that some spammer used to spam a wiki or blog. In an effort to fight back against the spam, we at chongqed.org ask wiki maintainers and bloggers to change the spammers' links to point to us, using the same keywords that the spammer used. We are thus trying to make those acts of spamming backfire at the spammers. They will not place their site at the top of the search engine results, but this page here. And here we have the opportunity to let you know about the spammers and the methods they use.
So we kindly ask you to think about this questions:
Would you buy something from or do business with somebody who destroys the work of others just to get a better page rank?
Do you think that somebody with rude, unfair, and destructive marketing strategies would be a reliable, trustworthy business partner?