Are you familiar with social media spammers? They never contribute to community, they just hundreds groups, invite everyone to be a friend, and send messages like: “Vote for me and I’ll vote for you”.

Social spammer is always use other members in their own interest and the only thing they want from you is to click their link. Most of them don’t have real profile, they have no avatar or they use their company logo, website link on spammer profile looks like list of keywords.

Social spammers are headache not only for popular networks like Digg or MyBlogLog. Less popular sites like SpicyPage, Bizzlo, or Zimbio are also receive spam submissions and messages. People spam social media not only for traffic, but also to increase link popularity and search engine rankings. Many spammers gave up to terrorize free directories and blog comment fields because most of them require human approval. Social media sites approve links and deliver comments automatically hoping that regular users will block it by clicking “spam” button.

  As shown above, these spammers used 2 accounts to submit Viagra spam on Digg and vote for it. All links are came from the same user and the same domain, in comment field they submitted information about prices and extra links to order. We count at least 740 Viagra links which still bookmarked on Digg.

MyBlogLog spam comments for ShoeMoney:

Shoemaker is the one who got 20 public comments in past month (Shoemaker and God only knows how many private comments arrived), 15 of them are spam. Now I am not surprised why Jeremy hasn’t checked his profile since last June.

To decrease amount of spam, owners of social networks have to make hard decisions. Here some changes which was made recently by different social sites:

• Delicious added “nofollow” tags for all submissions.
• MyBlogLog doesn’t allow to join more than 15 groups in 1 day.
• Sphinn gives all new members limited access for 7 days.
• Reddit set up 5 minutes waiting time between submissions.
• Zimbio allow to post only in 1 group.