On Link Spam

Somehow the spammers have figured out a way to post spam comments to this blog without getting an email notification sent to me.  (Since all comments have to be approved before they appear on the site.)  I’m not sure this is a win for them, since I didn’t even notice there were any comments to moderate until a few days ago.  This is probably a WordPress bug and I’ll be upgrading to the latest version soon.

The funny part about all this was the different kinds of spam comments I was getting.  For those who don’t know how this works, the reason that spammers try to post comments on blogs is to affect search engine rankings.  If they can get many sites to include mentions of their product or even better, a link to their webpage, it increases their search ranking.  To this end most “link spam” you’ll see will include a long list of search terms (drugs, porn or both) and if the site allows HTML tags in comments these terms will be links.  Clicking through the over 250 bogus postings I found a breed that was much more clever.  Instead of random terms and links (which can easily be flagged by automatic filters) the comment body was one of a number of variations on, “Hi, first I want to say nice blog. I don’t always agree with your posts but it’s always a nice read. Keep up the great work.”  That’s right, my comment spam was complementing me.  Some other entertaining ones included, “Just got my new iPhone and this blog looks great on it.” and “Sory, delete plz. ”  How are these link spam?  Well, somebody figured out that WordPress lets you specify a website and email address as the author information for the comment.  They still get their rank boosting link and all they have to come up with is a reasonable sounding comment and they’re more likely to get approved.  I must say, the tactic almost worked.  While the comments that say nothing but “VIAGRA VIAGRA VIAGRA” are easy to filter out, each of these required careful reading and a check against the posting they were replying to to tell the difference between a new loyal reader and clever spambot.

If any of you spammers are reading this: Good job, nice try, now GO AWAY!