Lijit Getting Spammed

Just saw this guy’s lijit widget filled with a certain domain. Makes sense that this would begin happening — basically, type your domain into any lijit widget a bunch of times, it’ll become most frequently searched for item on a blogger’s site, and then you’ll get free enlarged visibility of your domain on each of those blogs. To ensure extra sneakiness, do this from multiple IPs. [I'm sure lijit will work to remedy/prevent this; sucks that spammers have to be everywhere]

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  • http://lijit.com Micah Baldwin

    Steve, its definitely horrible that spammers love to ruin all the good work that folks do growing their blog traffic.

    At Lijit, we are committed to provide a feature set that truly allows bloggers to be better bloggers through understanding their user base and providing a trusted network search application that is as spam free as possible.

    Because our users select their trusted sources, most of the spam is eliminated from the results.

    As for the popular searches cloud, the spam you outline occurs when some doesnt have a ton of total searches which allows spammers to enter a term over and over and over again and have it appear in the popular searches cloud.

    There are three features we created to help fight this. First, on the profile page itself, a user can filter any specific term from the popular search cloud. Also, at the profile page, the user can select the naughty word filter, which is tested against a huge list of unpleasant words. Finally, having a link in a popular searches cloud, other than the visual, has little to no value to a spammer because its a javascript link.

    We are continuing to roll out features and tweak our system to reduce any potential spam.

    This example did get me thinking of a couple of solutions (such as discounting multiple searches from the same IP) to this specific issue that I will pass onto our development team.

    Interestingly enough, the link on the site you reference is actually to a blog post the blogger did about Skype spam that include the search term.