Blog Post
Spam Hunting
The last two weeks we’ve dealt with the whys and wherefores of blog comment spam, and some common tactics those sneaky little devils use to try and get themselves published on your blog.
For a refresher, visit the Spam Post Part 1 and Spam Post Part 2.
This week, we have a continued look at the more pervasive techniques spammers use to look legitimate and get exposure for whatever they’re schlepping.
First of all, certainly the class will recognize the junk links at the bottom. Correct? Good!
Now on to the content of this comment. We have, as we saw last week, a quick butter-you-up at the start. Then, it moves on into a cry for help. “Oh no! Your RSS feed is malfunctioning! Please help me fix it!” Chivalrous and dashing, you sweep in to save the day, responding to them in the comments – or by email. Either way is great for them: if you reply via comment, they get their links posted on your site; if you respond by email, suddenly your inbox will be overflowing with junk as they sell your address to every black hat mailing service in the world.
Here’s another plea for help. This one is especially amusing if you don’t actually have a “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox on your blog.
Conversely, here’s an offer of help. This one is a little different from comments we’ve seen to this point:
- it is largely aimed at you the site owner (click this link to improve your search traffic!)
- at first glance the junk link actually looks like it might be relevant to your site
This comment, however, should be setting off warning bells because a) they’re trying to sell you something, and b) it looks like the sort of thing you’d get in your email junk folder. Also, if you blog for long enough, you’ll see this same kind of comment over and over.
This one doesn’t take a lot of explanation… Just for the fun of it we ran this through Google translate. Apparently it’s an ad for “hair removal private parts.” Yikes!
To be fair, it’s possible that some nice Russian person read your blog and decided to leave a real comment. This being an English-speaking blog, however, the comment would probably also be in English.
Sometimes you’ll get a completely random story. The “I know this is off topic” schtick is one we used to see a lot on message boards on news sites, usually to do with work-at-home systems.
This particular comment, as with one we saw last week, doesn’t have a link in the text – but there is a link provided with the commenter’s name. If we were to approve this comment, the name would show up as a link to this site.
Last but not least, here is a comment that invites you to make a post on this person’s blog. Wow! Someone thinks my writing is good enough to have me guest post on their blog! That surely will provoke a response from me, right?
If the NFL jerseys links at bottom weren’t enough of a dead giveaway, we can also preview the site they list as belonging to them. This is a handy feature of WordPress that means you don’t have to actually visit the site in question (which could very well install viruses and other nasties on your computer). Hovering over the URL, we get:
I don’t think they really have any use for my content.
We’ll wrap it all up next week with some tools to make spam prevention easier for you as a website owner.
Have you ever seen any of these on your blog? Let us know in the comments – provided, of course, that you’re not a spammer!