What You Can Learn from Comment Spam
I just deleted about 10,000 comment spams from a blog. What could one learn from going through all that spam?
High Value Keyword Net:
Comment spam ads (outside of porn) are typically the same topics advertised on the Yahoo! homepage and on About.com's brand sponsored content sections.
Spammers who spam others blogs are generally focused on profit and results oriented. Many of them do dumb stuff, but some of them will leave a competitive research trail worth looking at, complete with the TYPES of keywords that are profitabe (pornography, perscription brands, gambling, things associated with finance) and important keyword modifiers.
How to Leave Feedback:
Given the results orientated nature of spam, it is unsurprising that many comment spammers leave comments that are generic, non-personalized, and flattering. If you want people to respond to you the flattering angle is probably effective, but message personalization is also key.
The Cost of Free Content:
if you let others litter your site with spam it is easy for others to think you don't believe in your own product. As one person stated on the blog with spammy comments:
Take notice of the spam here on the blog, they don’t care about this site and they don’t care about paying their customers.
Why wouldnt search engines eventually do the same? Sure spam is free content, but if it puts you in a bad linguistic neighborhood what is the cost?
Comments
If you're having to delete 10,000 spam entries at a time you should look at getting some form of spam protection... like simple captchas or use a service like akismet...
Hey Aaron,
You should definatley install
Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/word-press-1-5-plugin-referer...
And Bad Behavior
http://error.wordpress.com/2006/07/04/bad-behavior-2/
I have both, and never gotten spammed!
Cheers,
B
Blog spam seems to be getting worse and worse… spam protections helps a lot, but there are still people who take the time to manually bypass it. Why take the time if message you leave is written in broken English with major spelling/grammar errors and doesn’t make any sense. You’d think that if someone is taking the time to spam you by hand, they’d at least make it good :)
I agree with you Aaron, If I 'm fed up of all the poker spam especially.
My company recently got spammed heavily.. we were able to defeat the spam fairly easily by adding in a few words to ignore. Every time a sales inquiry is detected as spam its sent to me, otherwise it is sent to our staff. I get a couple hundred per day but its easy to scan the subjects and find the ones which are legitimate. The reason I still scan through the sales inquires is that we're in a financial market where a single sale can be big money.
One great way of knowing if a website you subscribed to or left your mail in is spamming you is the following...
Instead of leaving your normal gmail address for exaple
address@gmail.com
you should add a plus sign after your user name with the name of the site you're leaving your info in. for example
address+seobook@gmail.com
What Gmail does is it ignores everything between the plus sign and the "@" simbol (plus sign included). So if someone would send you a mail at youraddress+kjhakjasd1231231@gmail.com you would still recieve the mail.
The next step is the run a search in your gmail spam box and check wich spammer sent a mail to the address address+seobook@gmail.com
That spammer got your data from seobook (sorry for the example) and you can do the same to know if spammers get your data from a mybloglog profile page, etc.
Hope it was useful!
Dario Manoukian
My blog got a #2 ranking on google.co.nz for "buy propecia" based on some comment spam that I took too long to delete.
Not much competetion / traffic on google.co.nz (New Zealand sites only) but if that result was on google.com, I'd quit my job and start a hair loss shop :)
Good for a laugh if nothing else.
Even my super-new blog started getting hit by those bastards. Some dodgy parmacheutical company keeps trying to spam me. I did a traceroute, found their internet provider and reported them. No reply yet apart from the automated acknowledgement. Does anyone else have any experience reporting blog spam?
Somebody should sue Pfizer for all the Viagra spam on the net. Chances to win are minuscule, but if done properly, the case would generate enough publicity to pay for the expenses of the brave sole and it might still send the right message.
It is not the first time I read here about comment spam as a source of ideas. I wonder if anyone made use and achieved any success with this technique.
I am also annoyed with porn links in my comments so I use CMS and enable commenting only to registered users. YOu can do that also
re: Dario's comment, I'm sure spammers will get more and more creative
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I started sharing my spam keywords on my blog a few months ago. I think it would be great to fight spam with good SEO and use what we can learn from blog spammers against them (and pocket some cash).
I started a thread here keywords spammers are using this week
Thanks,
Buck
Aaron,
How often are you checking your filter?
I am not quite sure why anyone would spam a prominent blog, especially when they don't get through.
I continually get the same spam from the same IPs with the same messages, I don't get it?
Oh, and no content is free!
I uses Akismet for Wordpress and it does a great job stopping most of this. It's unreal the amount of spam that is attracted. The site has only been live again for a month and Akismet has captured 168 spam comments. I can only imagine how bad it is on an established blog.
I would like to see all blog spammers sent to Guantanamo Bay in the cell left vacant by David Hicks!!
What i find funny is when they spam my contact form like its a comment for a blog post. I found this article funny blah blah blah... And the way it was submitted was my contact form :)
Add new comment