How to identify spammers on Twitter

Google's "site:" search command causes Google's search engines to return the results of a search from a target web site. After entering the "site:" search command, you can add keywords, negative search terms, and search modifiers to return specific results you want. In this case you want to search twitter.com.

Go to Google's search bar and type site:twitter.com, followed by a keyword of your choice. Your search string should look like this: site:twitter.com spam.

After entering site:twitter.com spam, Google's search engines will return pages upon pages of tweets that unclude the word "spam". Look through the first five or ten pages and see if there are repetitive tweets from a single Twitter user account. Make a note about the user's account name and the web address that is the source of the tweet. Does the tweeter have several variations in his or her user name? Are there multiple tweets from more than one website?

There are several Twitter apps that are designed for posting tweets sometime in the future. This is a convenient tool for many users, especially those that want to tweet something in the future but can't be at their computer to do so. These apps can also allow users to create multiple accounts and, with multiple e-mail account, such as those allowed by some e-mail programs, someone can create a matrix of Twitter accounts and a means of repeatedly posting single or multiple tweets at any time and date. Look for multiple tweets about the same subject posted from different websites. These are sometimes called "auto-posters", which is just a nice name for spammers.

You can expand your search for Twitter spammers by replacing the search keyword with the domain name.

If you notice a large number of tweets by a particular tweeter, you can narrow the search results by entering a modified search string, site:twitter.com "domain.com". The search results will return all Twitter posts from that domain you entered. Just for fun, type in site:twitter.com helium.com - the results might surprise you.

Take it to the next step by typing in site:twitter.com domain.com +"keyword", where the keyword is something near and dear to you.

The search string, site:twitter.com domain.com, can be modified by adding keywords that are more specific. you can do this by adding the "+keyword". For example, the following search string site:twitter.com "domain.com" +"john public" would return every tweet posted through domain.com by the twitter account with the name john public. You could modify your search using any of the twitter user name variations.

Finally, some twitter spammers use multiple auto-posting apps along with multiple user names to essentially carpet-bomb twitter with tweets.