2002 • December • 02

Incomprehensible comment spam drifting in

This really confuses me. Seems that I've gotten 2 pieces of comment spam on one of my more visible blog entries (due to controversy) from back in September, More on the Monster Mash. The first one expresses confusion, then links to something about zip codes, and links again to something about business plans. The second one is apparently a strange flame at DaveWiner, then links to something about vehicle history reports.

I'll likely delete these in a lil while, but it really confuses me. Do things like this really bring in financial results to the spammers? Random links in nonsensical comments and inappropriate flames? Do they really have some metrics on this, before & after spam revenue results? This, and other spam, is really seeming like superstition in pigeons, where various kinds of spam are tried and maybe money is made so more kinds of spam are tried until the oddest forms appear.

I really do hope that, some day, the full fury of hell and recipients of spam scorned rain down on the heads of all those slimy bastards.

shortname=ooocda

Archived Comments

Phil Ringnalda

2002-12-03T06:59:26

I'm probably giving him too much credit, but he seems to be experimenting with ways to spam comments without having you notice. The one I got today, he just quoted the last paragraph from two comments up, which might have slipped past me on a busy day if it wasn't so obviously my own phrasing that he was quoting. Oops. Same IP address when he spammed me last week and again this time, so until he learns how to fake it or starts using throwdown dialup accounts just blocking that IP should get rid of him. My very favorite feature of his spam, though, is the way he finds you: via a Google search for pages that link to his previous spam victim. Both times, he's come to me via links to anderja's blog, so now I've got this nagging association of Anders and spam. Chances are, someone in either the referrers or the comments on your post is also pissed about being spammed today, and someone who links to you is digging through their access log and asking themselves why Les sent a spammer their way.
Phil Ringnalda

2002-12-03T07:05:37

Oh, yeah: why spam blog comments? Where else can you get your crappy site linked from a few hundred pages with decent PageRank? The more sites that Google respects that link the words car fax to his crappy site, the more traffic he gets, so if you're still awake you might want to go ahead and delete them now, before Googlebot wanders by and thinks those are your favorite sites for zip codes, business plans, and vehicle history reports. He doesn't expect people reading your old entry to decide that rather than deleting their copy of Radio they should buy a $30 zip code program, he just wants the links to last long enough to get indexed.
l.m.orchard

2002-12-03T11:03:10

Oh, duh - just catching up on the whole emergent blog spam problem. Not superstition in pigeons after all. Luckily I subscribe to an RSS feed of comments from my blog, so I catch things like this on older entries. One thing I'd just thought of: What if I had a filter on comments that wrapped all links found with a local redirect script? It would be a link to a local script with the actual link as a parameter. A little obfuscation, so I hope people could still see goatse.cx in the status bar, but I'd hope it wouldn't contribute to PageRank.
Phil Ringnalda

2002-12-03T14:19:37

That has the feel of an idea in the right direction, but I don't think it would work as-is. I'm pretty sure that Google follows links with query strings now (the way I remember it is that they'll follow a link with a query, but they won't follow links with queries from that page, so they don't get trapped). You still see people using those, but I think it's a PageRank management thing: if all your outbound links come from one low-ranked page buried several directories deep, then you can keep more PR and give less to people you link to (a rather foreign philosophy for PageRank-spewing blogs).
andersja

2002-12-03T15:35:20

Very bad stuff indeed, this comment spamming. The motivation (from the spammers' side) is clear enough, as Phil says above as well: Googlejuice... Where they before maybe would have posted in a zillion guestbooks, they get much better "value" by posting in blogs (which do tend to have good Google PageRank). I guess the tactic the spammer uses to find new blogs (searching for blogs that link to previous victim) ensures that he/she targets blogs that show up high in Google = has good pagerank... My comments (and Phil's): http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/11/25/blog_commentspam.html