October 13, 2003
It was just a matter of time...
I just got my first automated blog-comment spam, attached to my post about artificial diamonds (I've since deleted it). Interestingly enough, the spam wasn't meant for me or my readers but for Google — it was just random snatches of English peppered with the word "jewelry" and links to http://jewelry.lstor.com/, which produces more random phrases. No doubt the idea is to raise the pagerank of some real page that will go there later.
Wonder if this is what they mean when all those spammers keep telling me they can raise my Google ranking?
Posted by bug to Media Technology at October 13, 2003 7:34 PM | TrackBackI maintain a blog as well, and this has been a growing problem for me. Exponential increase and all that. I recently posted an entry to vent my frustration, and someone pointed out a rather clever solution. Mimic Yahoo's approach to verifying that the commenter is human by asking them to enter a displayed word or number.
James Seng has implemented a rough version of this here:
http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html
I have yet to implement it, but I'm hoping to get to it this weekend.
Posted by: Jamie Sidey at October 14, 2003 7:56 AMI may try that if it keeps up (just got a second one, same URL, different originating IP). In the meantime I'm slowly shifting my configuration away from the default MovableType. It won't stop anyone who writes a bot specifically for my site, but I'll betcha the spammers just have a simple script that gets the defaults. There's security in diversity.
Posted by: bug at October 14, 2003 10:28 PMThat's just bizarre. It's not like google is
an inanimate object. Google's employees read
blogs like everyone else, and it would be trivial
for them to add something to downrank sites linked to by blogspammers.
And in fact Google does downrank (or remove) sites that are especially guilty of trying to game their system, but I guess spammers figure they can flood the system.
MovableType says they're working on the problem, and in the meantime Jay Allen has a spam-removal MT-Blacklist plugin.
Posted by: bug at October 18, 2003 3:50 AMDisable your HTML or else have some type of email verification if you want to stop spam - the problem actually lies with Google's ranking system.
[Edit by Bug: changed the spammer address linked from the "." above to example.com — they're getting more clever all the time...]
Posted by: eco at February 6, 2004 1:13 AM