Blog Spam: The New Evil
Okay, so it sounds like I’m in rant mood here, and I am. I’ve disabled comments for our blog - for every comment posted that was interesting and provocative (i.e. posted by an intelligent human), there were about 300 comments advertising the usual, and posted by a software program or a spammer with a lot of time on their hands.
Spam in blogs is a big issue - this Wikipedia article describes it better (and less lividly) than I ever could. Essentially, a spammer posts on your blog with links to their website.
Some of these spam comments are funny, but by and large they are hugely predictable, and make me do the angry dance. A (very) quick survey of the 10,510 comments awaiting moderation for the Clientwell blog shows that there are four specific categories of blog spam:
Blog Spam Category #1: Idiot Spam
This is where the spammer assumes that the comment posted on our blog will go live immediately, so they can put whatever they want in their. Depending on what the spammer is promoting, it’ll look something like: “dunlop goodrich kumho tires tyres”. Okay, usually it’ll be a lot more ’sexy’ (in a very literal sense). Every word will be linked to the spammer’s site. I’ll be expected to leave it as a comment on my blog. Ah bless.
Blog Spam Category #2: I like your site
This goes along the lines of “Very interesting post - check out praxis viagra mp3 etc etc etc”. The spammer tries to be ingratiating, but then gets down to the business of hawking their wares. Fair enough, you’re at least pretending that you read the article before you got down to the sales pitch, but you’re still not getting in.
Blog Spam Category #3: Tied to a news event
Borrowed from the PR industry, this blog comment will attempt to come across as a news article, with links to the spammer’s site. So, we’ve got a few articles that start like: “ORANJESTAD, Aruba - Felix rapidly strengthened into a dangerous Category 5 hurricane and churned through the Caribbean Sea on a path toward Central America…”. It’s a nice touch, but the lack of relevance to online marketing means it’s easily flagged.
Blog Spam Category #4: Bizarre, just…bizarre
The final category of blog spam is often the funniest of all. For example, on 7 September, at 9:39 AM, someone called Inispeple read one of our previous blog articles (presumably) and then decided to post: “The kisekae to indian of your picking problems could be invalid if you heckling up disheartening productiveness discount…” I tried to put in more of the text, but the copy and paste function on my laptop broke into laughter. Anyway, this punter was trying to hawk log homes in Alaska. Good luck to him.
So, just in case you wanted to leave an insightful comment on our blog and were thwarted, please accept my apologies. If you’d like to get in touch about any of these articles, you can email me at david@clientwell.com. That does assume that you’re not trying to sell me a log home in Alaska.
