In my last post, I showed an example of what I thought was an attempt at competitive sabotage. Within a minute of clicking the publish button, I received a good example of real comment spam, so I thought I’d post it so everyone can see the difference.
Name : Press Release
E-mail: ip_fresh@yahoo.com
URL: http://www.media-press-release.com
IP: 86.105.70.148 , dyn-86.105.70.148.cj.upcnet.ro
Comment: When the Zawodny v. Cutts debate broke, we decided to go with the link condom, and then I posted about our decision on the company blog.
(OK, the anchor text actually said press release, but I don’t really trust nofollow, so I changed it)
The text in the comment was taken from the last comment in the Jeremy Link Condom post. (a trackback from Greg Hartnett’s Blog)
When I first read it, I thought that it was a trackback from Media Press Release’s site. The use of Greg’s text gave the impression that MPR was Greg’s PR firm and he was using the Jeremy post to generate a "Best of the Web" press release.
I thought that was a little cheesy, so I went to the site to read the press release. But I couldn’t find it. I searched for "Best of the Web," BOTW, and Jeremy Zawodny. I found absolutely nothing.
It turns out, this was just a clever comment from someone spamming on behalf of Media Press Release. Notice how he/she targeted the keyword phrase press release in both the title and body of the comment? That’s not something a competitor would do. Doing that would almost guarantee a Top 10 ranking on Yahoo and MSN for Media Press Release.
Comments
7 Responses to “ Blog Spamming Part 2 ”
Spammers suck. Oh, and does that really work for MSN and Yahoo? If that’s the case, MSN and Yahoo suck. Just kidding… they just have some stuff to work out yet.
Ok, seriously, the ability of blogs to manipulate serps based upon comments is getting to the point of annoying. Comments mean nothing and shouldn’t count for much of anything in my book. Posts can count for some value, but they can be very biased (i.e. my blog favors my site, imagine that!)
Is there a happy medium that you can see where engines could figure out the objective blogs and discount the rest? I doubt it, so my feeling is blogs are going to go to their own search and they’ll eventually stop being factored into organic SERPs all together. At that point, we’ll have people like your friends listed above to thank for making the web a lesser place.
The last two posts on blog spam have been informative. But it’s also the reason why I disabled comments a long time ago.
Does it hinder interaction? Sure. Part of a blog being a blog is commenting on the post. But at this point I figure nearly everyone has blog and if they want to comment on one of my entries, for example, they can do it on their blog and trackback to the original post.
Really, I just don’t have the energy to keep the blog clear of spam.
nice catch! I heard there was a blog that would stop “comment spam” like this. I don’t remember the name though
I receive zillion of this fake comments every day. Do they think we are all stupid? I have a site that is mostly in italian language and spam comments are in english…they are not targeting their spam, it’s ridicolus. Maybe a little spam made with more brain than that, or simply a little number of REAL comments, can have better results.
I’m shocked that no one has come out with a good blog comment spam filter. 90% of the blog spam we get comes from poker sites. Simply filtering the words poker, drug and ciallis would go a long way.
I do believe that comments enhance a blog tremendously, and it is unfortunate that people are in the position of disabling comments because of this spam.
Yes, comments create interactivity, but their symbolic nature is much more: transparency and openness. In my eyes, true credibility is earned when you can make a statement or a claim, and allow others to hash it out with you below. That is what makes the concept of blogging great.
On my wordpress sites I use Spam Karma. Occasionally it sends me a request to check on a comment that came through but for the most part it blocks them all. The past two days two of my blogs got hit with a total of 120 - 150 comment spams. It caught them all with no action from me. The legit comments seem to always get through also. So far I have not had to nofollow anything yet since I do not mind people who have something to say and actually adding to the conversation getting a link to their site. To me the conversation is what a blog is all about and spreading that conversation is the opitomy of what the web should be.
Being a complete SEO wannabe it is also great to read kinda complicated informations, like the one concerning the spamming of you blog.
I found the link to your blog thru Mikkel deMibs blog.
Have a great day, I will be commending this blog.
Lasse