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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

As Google is killing more and more content farms, it makes sense spammers are moving towards sites that have tons of authority, and spamming there. Can't get "buy car insurance" to rank for your spamblog? No problem, create a fake question in Yahoo Answers with the keywords in your title, and a fake answer with your affiliate link. Repeat in Pinterest, Amazon Askville, Quora, etc.

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This is a good point - i've seen a bunch of Facebook Notes page spam, using the Amazon affiliate program, on the first page for product SKU queries. It seems these pages can be created faster than FB can remove them, and they cycle into the first page of SERPs due to the massive domain authority of FB even though they're just spun Amazon affiliate content.

Spammers were doing that 6+ years ago. It worked. It still does.

Content farm = spamming to make money off of adsense and display advertising. What you are referring to would be more accurately termed a gateway page, for which the sole purpose is to direct a user off to an affiliate link or another site.

Affiliate links are filtered out of Yahoo Answers, or at least they were 4 or 5 years ago when I posted one.

You could use a redirection service. If they actually follow the redirects to the final destination, you could simply inspect the User-Agent header and redirect their automatic checker to a different page. If they pretend to be a browser by faking the agent, you can create a page with a hidden form (method=get, target=your_affiliate_url) that is submitted using Javascript.

Yahoo Answers is so 2007 when it comes to spamming...

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