And Now, Back to “Spammers. Are. Stupid!”
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So, I was at my main site, making some overdue posts when I realized there were 50 posts marked as spam in Akismet, the plugin that auto-moderates spam. I went through to scan the list as I always do when I catch it under 100, because it seems to mis-file about one real comment per hundred spammy ones. (Which to me is worth it.)
And I find this:
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists
The poster?
My good friend, penis enlargement. Of course, I’m not a dude, so I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a penis which needs enlarging, And, reasonably sure that this isn’t a real person’s name or handle!
Not to mention that the post was from a “discount pharmaceuticals site”.
Since I wrote about something along those lines yesterday, he almost would have had me, but for the dumb ass handle. Spammers. They’re occasionally kind of cute in the midst of being a useless waste of time.
What was your favorite spam comment today? Do you read them? Laugh at them? Want to find the people posting them and teach them a better way? Should they be killed the Vlad the Impaler way?
[tags]spam, spomment, spam comment, penis enlargement[/tags]
2 Comments
Howard Young
August 3rd, 2007
at 10:24am
I never look in the spam queue anymore. It just takes too much time. What surprises me is when comment spam leaks through and requires my moderation.
One thing that I’ve noticed in the Google Webmaster Tools (External Links), is that Google is keeping track of links to your site regardless of the “nofollow” tag. Perhaps this is why comment spam still continues.
Ms. Wahala
August 4th, 2007
at 12:48pm
I’d like to be able to say it takes too much time but too many thoughtful, meaningful comments end up in there. Not to mention that some of my opt-in clients don’t get my emails sometimes. I’m not surprised about it leaking through either - spammers may be stupid, but apparently the technology behind spamming gets smarter all the time.
Spam continues because 1 - if you’re lazy enough to spam as a solution, you probably don’t know about no-follow. There are lots of BLOGGERS who don’t know about no-follow. And just because a link is no-followed doesn’t mean it won’t generate traffic. Good eye on the tools thing - Google won’t say the link isn’t stil there, what happens, in my understanding is that Google will not give you the “juice” from a nofollow link.