Recently I've noticed an increase in the number spam tweets that link to my site and I'm not sure what the motivation is.<p>Are they simply trying to reduce their spam profile by linking to legitimate sites to make them less likely to flagged as spam by Twitter, or could there be something a little darker going on?<p>An example tweet is from twitter user @MZoASTEFUb:<p><i>"@jylan gonna stand there and watch me burn but thats alright...LOL JK, Im gonna stop drop and roll! itstheteenlife http://bl.inc.gs/xSC8B"</i><p>The bl.inc.gs link redirects to my site. This was brought to my attention by the target of the tweet @jylan.<p>Any idea what might be happening here?
My guess is that it is either one of two things:<p>1. Just link spam-testing or mixing legitimate-looking spam with illegitimate.<p>2. The plan is to use a delayed URL redirection change technique.<p>For example, in blogs, etc. you can change the link that your profile goes to after the fact, so at first that "Nice post. Thanks!" comment and a link to someone's legitimate blog via the poster's username seems innocuous. Later after you ignore it, they change it to point at their spam site. Hoping you don't notice. They can even change the link that their profile goes to only at certain times of day if they wish and then back later, hoping you won't notice and hoping that Google will pick up their spam link vs. the innocuous-looking fake spam link.<p>By the same token, a URL shortener that could support changing the URL that the shortened URL goes to could be used in exactly the same way. Even if bl.inc.gs seems legit, there may be a backdoor (known or unknown) letting them to change the URL that the shortened URL goes to.