The indiscriminate distribution of electronic messages. Spam is most commonly associated with the huge number of unsolicited e-mails users receive – especially if they have made their e-mail address public at some point either on a website or forum. Spammers also collect e-mail addresses by purchasing them from other spammers. Response rates are tiny as most users have spam controls in place automatically removing spam and those that don’t often find it irritating and delete messages without reading. However, despite this, and huge potential fines for spamming in some jurisdictions, it remains a popular and profitable business model for dark economy business as it has extremely low costs the low response rate doesn’t matter – spammers can hugely increase the number of messages they send without significant increases in cost.
As the types of electronic communication broaden, the opportunity for spammers has increased. We now see spam comments in the footers of almost every blog and automated software even exists for the registering to and spamming of forums with messages advertising everything from Viagra to socks. Often the sole purpose of this spam is to gain links back to the main site – ie for SEO purposes.
As a result of this particular type of spam you will often hear the phrase ‘link spam’. This is sometimes extended beyond leaving messages to the creation of nonsensical, often automated content on the Internet that has no purpose other than to create a link back to a home site. The submission of thousands of spun (rewritten using an automated program) articles which make little sense to article directories just to get a link in the footer would be an example of this behaviour.