“There are probably quite a few dmoz.org editors among us, and most will be familiar with techniques such as duplicate submissions and keyword loading (submitting the same site to multiple categories under different names/URLs and using lots of keywords in the submitted title/description, respectively). What some newbie marketers think they will get away with in this area is often dumbfounding, but boy, do I have a ripper for you!

“Recently I checked out a submitted 'Win on the Web' site and found it to be the AllAdvantage sweepstakes page. Shome mistake, shurely? No, I went in and checked - and there it was. Someone had actually submitted this competition page from the AllAdvantage site to the directory under a different name, complete with his or her affiliated link as the URL!

“AllAdvantage users are well known for their unique combination of naivety and greed, but could this trend actually be accelerating? It's already gone way beyond 'acquaintance spam' and is currently a constant - and growing - irritation to community groups across the Web. The trademark of an amateur site used to be web awards, now it's an AllAdvantage banner.

“Forget viral marketing - this is a rash that's going to get worse before it gets better.”

...says our ranter Tim Ireland, Director of Marketing at http://www.designercity.com