101 Articles Craigslist Spamming
CRAIGSLIST SPAMMING
Spamming the search engines using craigslist, a popular classifieds website, has been into existence from the time craigslist became popular. Craigslist is used by millions of sellers, buyers, service providers as a medium to sell / buy products, which are no longer of any use or if the person want to get rid of something.Recently we came across a potential client, who wanted to do SEO for his website. When we asked for his website address, he told me to go to Miami craigslist and type real estate for sale. I was stunned to see that almost 30 listings that came up were posted by him with almost identical information.
Back in 2006 craigslist was a popular place and search engines loved to crawl their pages for ranking purpose. Some craigslist pages had good unique well written classifieds and search engines like information and they grabbed the content for ranking. But some aggressive SEO companies or consultants started recommending, using craigslist as a place to submit your links.
Craigslist has a huge network of websites. They have sub domains for almost all popular cities in US and some popular cities in many countries. Search engine spammers take advantage of this and will try to spam every possible craigslist site with an advertisement with embedded links. The Ad, they post will only be to get a backlink from that particular craigslist page.
Google and other search engines realized this and they are no more proactive in crawling craigslist websites. Also craigslist has strict community flagging systems and they were able to keep out competitors to quite an extent. Many tools have been developed to spam craigslist with multiple posts.
In recent years craigslist has started using no follow for their links. This will combat link spam and will discourage search engine spammers from using craigslist as a SEO tool.
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Working Example |
This is a working example of an advertisement spam that appeared in craigslist website.
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |