Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/Dead link spamming

Sock puppet investigation

I think there is a good chance that this is one or a few people using multiple accounts. Would a sock puppet investigation help us pull up more? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:47, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm not convinced that this is the case. The example blog post linked on the page shows that, judging by the number of comments, just those instructions received a lot of views. It wouldn't surprise me if these were all separate people. Additionally I would mainly be suspicious if multiple accounts were spamming links to the same site, which we haven't seen yet. Sam Walton (talk) 12:55, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

We have paid editors who appear to be using one account per "job". Thus we end up with different links by each account. See [1] and [2] as examples. On this site they also use many accounts.

I have more evidence of multiple sock armies which I am still working on putting together. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:03, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Per earlier conversation at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive267#SEO_spam_attack, replacing dead links with spam URLs is listed in at least one SEO playbook as a "savvy" way to spam Wikipedia. --McGeddon (talk) 10:46, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

{{uw-dls}}

I recently made that user warning so that dead link spammers can be warned. Just a notice so you can mentioned it on the page. --TL22 (talk) 03:05, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Process status

"This is a cleanup process regarding an effort to spam links by disguising them as dead link replacements." - is this ongoing, or was it just to clean up a spate of deadlink spam last December, which is now over? It doesn't seem to have been updated since then. User:Samwalton9? --McGeddon (talk) 10:49, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Not sure; I've not been following it recently, though I should really get around to making that edit filter. I suspect this will be an ongoing thing, there are many many web pages out there describing how this SEO tactic works, and I don't expect it to stop anytime soon, though we've stopped actively looking at it here. Perhaps I'll look at that filter soon and we can see if it's still an issue. Sam Walton (talk) 10:53, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

I checked in after getting this guy blocked for it today. Would certainly be nice to see an edit filter that flagged these.

Do you know if anyone's considered a bot that flags deadlink-tagged URLs as having an archive.org backup? We obviously can't rely on a bot to add the archiveurl itself, as the page it's dug up might be an oblique 404, but replacing "dead link" with "dead link, possible archive version found at X" might help, even as just a human-readable, non-rendering parameter on the dead link template. --McGeddon (talk) 11:06, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Hm, not heard anyone suggest that, but it's a good idea. Sam Walton (talk) 11:15, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Drive-by archives

Some dead link spammers also replace the dead link with a copy of the original content on their own vaguely related site. See this one, storing such a page in "wp-content" ... That method is less effective (for spammers), and seems not very common though, but happened a few times during the last weeks. Still worth looking out for it, just replace such links with an Internet archive of the original page. GermanJoe (talk) 00:45, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

How to handle dead link spamming?

I've been seeing an upswing in dead link spamming, and would like to know how others are addressing it. Here are two examples: --Ronz (talk) 23:03, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

• 101.56.186.120 (talk · contribs) Replacing dead news sources with advertisments. I left a blatant vandal warning and think if the spammed links show up again that they be blacklisted. --Ronz (talk) 23:03, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

• Kralj187 (talk · contribs) Looks like a spammer decided to try to get some editing history for repairing dead links, sneaking in some of the previous spam. Note that even with the non-spam, the dead links were often to questionable sources if not outright refspam. I treated this editor as an spammer that's trying to obscure the spam. I left an s3 warning where the only other warning was an s1. --Ronz (talk) 23:03, 3 October 2015 (UTC)