Information from this source.

What this article is saying is that spammers now use “bots” or automated software to post spam links on various websites, blogs and forums. Kind of like those you always see in the very popular forums and blogs where the message makes no sense at all but most comes different links to various websites. I am sure that you guys know that incoming links (links pointing to a certain website) and the anchor text (the words in those links) is very important when it comes to Search Engine ranking, especially for Google. The more incoming links (with the correct anchor text) your site has, the better your rankings in the Search Engines will be. For example, to rank well for the terms “smelly shoes”, you need to have incoming links to your website with the anchor text “smelly shoes”. The more you have, the better your ranking will be. Sure, there are a lot of other criteria in which Search Engine ranks a website, but these links are the most important.

However, from what I read, the most affected are usually less popular terms. The main reason is because most of such spam links are of less value and thus cannot compete with the serious ones which have done a lot of Search Engine Optimization for their sites. However, the effects of such Search Spam can be felt by a lot of people because a lot of such spam sites are actually full of malware and viruses. So an innocent searcher directed to a site with malware and then get infected could possibly infected others as well.

Well, yes, Search Engines are trying their best to get rid of such sites on their Search Engine listings, but I guess it is a losing battle. Removing one site, up pops 3 more. I think everyone has a part to play in this little game. Spammers have to have access to websites, forums and blogs in order for them to spam their links, but if webmasters are more vigilant in moderating their sites and remove those spam links frequently, I think such spam attacks will fail pretty easily. For this blog, I have installed Akismet which helps control the amount of spam in my blog comments. For the rest of the comments, I merely moderate them. This way, my blog is spam link free! I think every webmaster should do that, this way in helps cut down the amount of spam links on the Internet. Well, until the spammers start something new of course.