Wikipedia External link spamming

(Spam Twitter)-Links normally to be avoided and Wikipedia:Conflict of interest

Adding external links to an article or user page for the purpose of promoting a website or a product is not allowed, and is considered to be spam. Although the specific links may be allowed under some circumstances, repeatedly adding links will in most cases result in all of them being removed.

Phrasing to avoid

It is also important to avoid giving an opportunity to spammers. Sometimes, the way an article is phrased attracts spammers. For example,

Social networking has flourished with websites such as Friendster and MySpace, ...

Examples of detergents include Tide, ...

The most notable MLM companies are Amway, ...

Many people feel Dr Pepper is the best tasting soft drink ... (this is also weasel wording)

Many blogs arose discussing this, see Some blog, ...

because it is far easier to add a link to the end of this kind of sentence than to add encyclopedic content.

Source soliciting

Source solicitations are messages on article talk pages which explicitly solicit editors to use a specific external source to expand an article. The current consensus on Wikipedia is that templates, categories and other forms of anonymous solicitation are inappropriate. Every article on Wikipedia can be expanded as a matter of course, but the question is in the details on a per-article basis. It is not possible to simply say "all articles of X type can be expanded using Y source".

There is no hard rule on when this crosses over from being a legitimate attempt to improve the article into being internal spam, but some guidelines and questions to consider:

Is the solicitation being made anonymously through the use of a template or Category?

Is the solicitation being duplicated across many articles at the same time, particularly when the articles relate to different topics?

Has there been no discussion (of a specific and substantive nature) on why the source should be used in each article?

Is the source controversial, such as being non-peer reviewed, old or polemic (see Wikipedia:Reliable sources)?

Is the source a commercial one?

External link spamming with bots

A few parties now appear to have a spambot capable of spamming wikis from several different wiki engines, analogous to the submitter scripts for guestbooks and blogs. They have a database of a few hundred wikis. Typically they insert external links. Like blog spam, their aim is to improve their search engine rankings, not to directly advertise their product.

If you see a bot inserting external links, please consider checking the other language wikis to see if the attack is widespread. If it is, please contact a sysop on the Meta-Wiki; they can put in a Wikimedia-wide text filter. Any Meta sysop can edit the Wikimedia-wide spam blacklist to add or remove the patterns that are recognized by the filter, with the changes taking effect immediately. New links can also be added to the list if a new spammer should start making the rounds.

Sysops are authorised to block unauthorised bots on sight. Spam bots should be treated equivalently as vandalbots. Edits by spambots constitute unauthorised defacement of websites, which is against the law in many countries, and may result in complaints to ISPs and (ultimately) prosecution.

The link spam problem extends far beyond Wikimedia projects, and is generally worse on smaller wikis where the community struggles to keep it clean. meta:Wiki Spam page (now obsolete) has some more general information and advice for users of wikis elsewhere on the Internet, while the MediaWiki Anti-Spam Features page describes features available in MediaWiki (for administrators running this software).