Monkey See, Monkey Do …Monkey SEO.

Using MySpace for marketing (or spamming, as the case may be)? Well think again my friends. It looks like the “free-for all” comment spam MySpace is coming to an end.

I just noticed this today, but it appears to have been in place for a few days now. No longer can you paste your hideous graphics with your useless URL to all of your so-called “friends” pages via comments for backlinks, or “link juice”.

Reactions to MySpace’s change are both good and bad, I suppose depending upon whether you enjoy comment spam on MySpace or not.

Good news is if you got into the MySpace comment spamming game prior to this change your spammy URLs are still good.

Going forward, however, MySpace has implemented a 302 redirect on all URLs in comments:

Notice the URL here www.msplinks.com, the image actually has a link to www.monkeyseo.com.

I tested other forms of communication on MySpace and found that only comments are affected by this change (so far).

A MySpace blog post:

MySpace blog post with URL is unaffected, no redirect.

A MySpace bulletin post:

MySpace bulletin post with URL is unaffected, no redirect.

A MySpace message:

MySpace message with URL is unaffected, no redirect.

Upon further investigation (I am a curious monkey), both Google and Yahoo are indexing these “pages”.

So…why didn’t MySpace just apply the nofollow attribute to the links in comments? Well, as most in the SEO industry already know, the nofollow tag doesn’t really work. Also, it is my assumption that they are tracking these redirect URLs and may someday use this information to really crack down on the spammers.

So, is MySpace using a redirect on all links in comments to deter comment spam? Will it really help to combat comment spam? Or will Myspace comment spam live on, because unfortunately a lot of the spammers are not only interested in backlinks, but the traffic?

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UPDATE: Spammer quickly finds work around.My MySpace blog post to test this and get screenshots from got SPAMMED! Apparently spammers can still get their links in blog comments:
The links in this blog comment do not have the msplinks.com redirect on them.~monkey seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under marketing, just playin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.