I hate spam on Twitter. Most spam is fairly obvious, some of it is a bit less so.

Here is an example of something that isn’t really classified as spam but, in my opinion, is just as bad. Someone tweets a link with a description. The link leads to the tweeter’s site which has another link to the site which contains the information. Here’s a capture of what you see from the link in the tweet:

I’m not going to post the tweet here. It describes the article that this link leads to. This is the tweeter’s site, not the site where the information is posted. It’s an intermediate step, one that generates income for the tweeter but, probably, not very much for the original creator of the information. To me, this is spam.

With absolutely no originality or, apparently, sense of fair play, the tweeter simply links pages from his page and tweets the link to his page. In order to get the information that is tweeted about, you have to go through two different sites. I tweet my own material, things that I have actually created. But I also share links that lead directly to other sites without going through any of my sites. This tweeter is doing this solely to make money, not to help the Twitter community.

If you follow people that do this double-click spamming, please un-follow them. This type of spam doesn’t qualify as spam, according to Twitter, but I’m sure that you would agree that is.

Thanks for reading!

Update: I received a comment on this post by, strangely enough, the spammer in question. I am not going to approve the comment because, guess what, he posted links to his own site in the comment. While he insists that he doesn’t make money from his site, there are two ‘Advertise Here’ spots on the right side of the page and a definite link to a hosting company on the page. The site is nothing but links to other sites, no information whatsoever. It’s obvious to me that even Google won’t allow their ads on a site like this. With Google, of course, content is king. When there’s no content, there’s no Google. Nice try, buddy. Your tweets and your site are contrary to the sense of community that Twitter is known for.

Update 2: This is a capture of Thomas’s site showing the potential for ads. With 182 pages of links, it’s kind of easy to see what there aren’t any there now.