Spam from Curve Dental

[jordansparks]

This is very interesting. In two entirely separate messages from two different users, the text, "dental software" in their message was a subtle link to Curve Dental dot com. I have removed the links for obvious reasons. It may not actually be someone from that company, but I can't think of any good reason for that text to be a link other then an attempt by Curve to boost their google rating. The posters are obviously sophisticated, having figured out how to post subtle links as well as images. Very curious.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2558&p=10707#p10707
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2399&p=10706#p10706

[Rickliftig]

There certainly have been some weird posts on the forum Jordan. Always interesting to see when they joined and at what time they posted. Some of the spam is coming from the other side of the world (IMHO). These two came through at roughly the same time. Very weird. I can't figure out the motivation in this type of post. Plus, anyone who goes to all of that trouble must have some time on their hands.

Weren't you going to add a verification question on the registration ie. what is G.V. Black's full name? <G>

[wjstarck]

Those both look automated to me. See how they picked up on the phrase "Color coded appointments" and just reworked the opening statement to "Color Coding" <blah> "appointments" perhaps using fuzzy logic. The second one is just an authentic looking garbage post.

Either that, or it has been farmed out to Russian/Romanian/whatever real humans who read posts and post responses. The tipoff is the blatant mis-capitalization of "Coding" in the posted response.

We used to deal with this in regard to click fraud on Google. Unscrupulous competitors will pay companies in Russia/Romania/whatever who have cadres of minions spread out over multiple IP address spaces that would fraudulently click on your link to drive up your advertising costs. Very dificult to prove, because the clicks come from many different IPs at (seemingly random) differing intervals.

At any rate, if Curve is behind it, shame on them. It's a sleazy way to launch a businees :p

[jordansparks]

I didn't consider that. It didn't come from Curve, but rather from a company that Curve hired to get better placement on google. Now it all makes sense.

I don't know about sleazy. Maybe just a touch desperate. Reminds me a lot of Lightyear. Curve seems to be using a business model of investors who need to make a return on their initial investment. This requires strong advertising and runs a certain risk of failing. They're trying really hard on the marketing side of things.

[Rickliftig]

Bill -

This is very interesting... so an offbeat question here... does it work? If I post to other sites with a linkback to my webpage, will Google pick up on that?

[jordansparks]

I think the answer to that has to be that nobody knows for sure. Google keeps their algorithms private, and they change them constantly to try to stay ahead of spammers. I would like to think that google has monitored our particular forum long enough to notice that we immediately delete spam and that we have no meaningless links or text. You can see the google bot logged into our forum regularly. It's possible/probable that it isn't looking for links at all, but is rather categorizing our forum for keywords. So in that case, all links might be ignored completely. Or if they do notice links, they probably ignore them at first since they know that we will quickly delete most of them.

[jordansparks]

Andy Jensen, from Curve, emailed me. He wanted me to post that they are embarrassed by the intrusion and have made arrangements that will prevent a similar event in the future. He also disagrees with my LightYear comparison, saying they have entirely different objectives.

I don't think it would be at all productive to crosspost this issue to any other forums like DentalTown.