Once again Google shows us just how uncoordinated a very large organization can be. Webmaster Central is telling us they will now discover new Web pages through comment feeds in ATOM/RSS format.
Why am I the only person to publicly note that this is an invitation to comment spammers to step up their dirty tactics?
And Lo! and Behold, that’s just what happened.
Today a link spammer dropped a comment on one of my personal blogs. Now, I get link spammed all the time, both at work and on my personal stuff. Usually I just delete the stuff, report it, whatever. Today, I was sorely tempted to approve the comment.
Why? Because it was completely relevant to my article (which I had written a couple of years ago). I thought, “Hm. I could delete the link and leave the comment….”
Of course, the more I looked at that comment, the more intrigued I became with how the spammer had managed to generate such a relevant comment. Could it be some link spammers still do hand jobs? The idea is unthinkable.
And, of course, that appears to not be the case. I finally scanned my article and found the same text as was in the comment. No wonder it was so well-written and relevant to my article.
Doh!
I guess that’s a head-smacking tip for the spam community. Frankly, scraping the article for your comment text may be old school for some link spammers but I’ve never seen it done before.
So let this be a lesson to everyone who thinks link spammers only drop irrelevant comments. Some of them, at least, have figured out a way to drop relevant comments. They’re just not unique, original comments.
Woe is the day when the script kiddies buy a tool that really works.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Craig Daniels 10.31.09 at 7:11 am
Thanks for the post, I’ve been seeing this quite a bit over the last couple of months and at first thought they were reading the posts and extracting a line or two as some kind of quote or creative flourish. One danger is that in haste a real comment with a quote will get deleted.
Sean@Enhance 11.02.09 at 9:27 am
Woe is the day when the script kiddies buy a tool that really works.
Michael Martinez 11.02.09 at 5:51 pm
Craig, you make a good point. However, I find it highly unlikely that anyone interested in Tolkien would try to link to their casino site from a Tolkien-only blog. I think the scripts lack the ability to determine relevance and, at least for now, anyone who is moderating blog comments has a pretty good chance of seeing the oddball link and recognizing it for what it is: spam.
I appreciate the need to build links, especially in hypercompetitive queries, but people need to learn to do it fairly. It’s not impossible to build a successful site in a competitive space using the generally accepted best practices of the field. You just need to put some time and effort into the process.
SEO by Just Say ON 11.04.09 at 6:30 am
I think you nailed it Michael. Linkbuilding has to be done, there’s no two ways about it, but SEOs should actually read the article before contributing [insightful] commentary. Doing so can establish mindshare for the client’s brand, and allows the SEO to blow off some steam and get heard.
ArcticLlama 11.12.09 at 6:45 am
Michael,
You are making the mistake of thinking too much like the good guys. You are correct about the right ways to build links and being successful using those methods. However, there are TONS of people out there who have no interest in doing that. They want 15,000 links, and they want them now, they don’t care where they come from, and they want them with zero effort. Chances are they don’t even put any effort into the site that they are building the links too either. (Google “auto blogging”) THAT is what a link spammer is, and this gives them another tool.
Second, if you run a blog that gets 15 or 20 comments a day, filtering them out manually like described in this post is easy done. If you get closer to 50 comments a day on 5 to 10 different blogs, manual filtering is much more difficult and something that must be done with an eye toward speed. Sure, the ones that link to diet-pills-from-canada-for-super-cheap.com are easy to spot, but a clever spammer is more subtle.
Nice post. I had missed this tidbit.
Google’s algorithm must be having some difficulty keeping up. First the blunder with the nofollow tag and now giving link spammers a new tool. Won’t be long before we see a WordPress plug-in to exploit this little doozy. After all, Google has just answered every whining link marketer’s big question, How do I get my site indexed faster?
I can already see the forum posts — Just make a bunch of comments in blogs that have feeds for their comments and the Google spiders will find you…
Brian
Freelance Writers at ArcticLlama, LLC
Michael Martinez 11.12.09 at 8:52 am
Brian, I find that publishing only a partial RSS feed invites fewer comments. That helps me keep the comments down tremendously.
I also find that occasionally leaving a nofollowed link in a long comment encourages people to come out and try engaging in some commenting.
You make some good points. Of course, fast indexing is the wave of the future. Some years ago someone who was once very visible in the SEO field, I think maybe DianeV, made the comment that she missed Infoseek because you could upload new page, submit it to Infoseek, see your page within an hour, and tweak it to grab a top ranking on the same day.
You can almost do that with Google now in some cases….
The good old days of search engine spam are coming back. Hang on to your hats, kiddies, because Caffeine will probably empower spammers in ways people never imagined before.
nigelburke 11.12.09 at 1:31 pm
What about installing the anti-spam comment plugins that are available for Wordpress? Are they effective in blocking spam comments?
Michael Martinez 11.12.09 at 3:25 pm
Akismet is a very good tool to have. But spammers are constantly probing the defenses. They eventually figure out ways to get around the most recent updates to any tool.
chouputra 11.22.09 at 9:56 pm
I don’t know if the person who posted on your comment is using automated tool but there are a good number of people who do manually post on comments and writing keyword such as “make quick money” as their name on blogs that provides dofollow hyperlink on comments.
Michael Martinez 11.23.09 at 10:47 am
I’m aware of the DoFollow link builders. I should hope they won’t come sniffing around my blogs, though, as I am now a firm believer in using “rel=’nofollow’” on all links in comments.
There is considerable irony in my position but that is just the way I think.
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