Well, I said in a past article that we were comment spammed, but that quick removal made them realise we were not a good target. I was wrong.

In the last 4 hours, we have been hit with about 40 or so spam comments posted to our past stories. Luckily I had changed the system over to ask us for approval before accepting any comments, so I was able to delete the spam comments before they were even published to the site. (though I expect a dozen more attempts when I get up in the morning.)

This is most likely being done via automated scripts, some real person looked out our system, and tailored a pre-made script to submit spam to it. It’s not really targeted at readers, they look to be targeted at Google and the other search engines in an effort to get the pages of the spammers ranked higher.

It would be interesting to see if the laws that apply to e-mail spam also applies to comment spam. If not, I’m betting that legislation will have to be approved at some stage as I suspect that this is just the tip of a huge fast approaching problem.

If whomever is doing this is reading. Keep in mind that if it keeps happening, I will put up a page on the site that details every online site you are promoting (with links that search engines can’t follow) and strongly encourages readers to spread the word that no business should be done with any site or company listed on the page and why. Then I’ll use every trick I know to get the page ranked as high on Google and the other engines for the very terms that you are trying to spam by commenting on our site. (And trust me, I’ve picked up a good many tricks over the years.) If you really must spam blogs and story comments, there are plenty of free blog services around, set-up a heap and spam them. It will have much the same result, and you won’t get deleted immediately, and the companies you are trying to promote won’t end up being hated by every webmaster with a comment system.

Regards

Franki

This article was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2004 at 6:15 am