Blog spam: The price of success

Z Trek reached a dubious milestone today. There were more than 50 pieces of blog spam when I checked in this morning.

This blog is set up so that all comments are moderated, and must be approved by yours truly before they can become visible on the site. However, the “leave a comment” link is easily detectable by robots, which are flooding the site with bogus comments. Some of them are simple “This is a great site! For more on this topic, see such-and-such site.” Others are packed with keywords and multiple links for things like mortgages, phishing schemes and pharmaceuticals.

Do spammers really think that people will read and click on those often-nonsensical postings? Maybe, maybe not. But even if nobody ever sees their spam comment, the robot will have succeeded in gaming searching engines, like Google and Yahoo. That’s because the search rankings algorithms for a page take into account the number of other sites that link to that page. If my site links to a spam site, that the spammer’s search engine ranking goes up. Or at least it used to; top search engines have adapted their algorithms and spiders to ignore these type of bogus links.

Fifty. And it was only about 20 a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, it only takes a moment to delete the spam comments using Blogger’s control panel. However, I feel the pain of owners of very heavily trafficked blogs, as the number of spam comments must be overwhelming. No wonder so many of my friends and colleagues have simply turned off commenting.

>> Update 2/4: Literally within 5 minutes of posting the above, its first spam comment showed up. It read (links removed): “Hello! You have a very nice blog. I’m here to share valuable info with you visit my blog ,about Mozilla Firefox web browser.” The post links to a site which has a hacked version of Firefox with spyware installed.