Interview with a link spammer

Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.

For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. He - we'll use the male notation, it's easier - would do this anyway for fun, but it's more than fun; he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. Skilled in Perl, LWP and PHP, Sam's first professional programming was done aged 13, when he sold some code to a gaming company. He's 32 now, and spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity.

So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking.