Our Blog’s First Comment Spam!

by Kerry Dean on 11/04/2009 at 2:53 pm in Commentary, Observations, Within Range

Wow! You should grab the baby book because this is an amazing moment. Our blog got hit with its first spam comment – on its second day of existence! Whoever left this spam comment is obviously quick, up-to-date and with it. And as you  will see below, this comment spammer is all about Fantasy Football and Final Fantasy.

I am relatively new to the world of blogging, and I made a promise to myself to share much of what I learn in this world of blogging. Now that we have our first comment spam, I figured it would be a great idea to share my knowledge about comment spam.

Comment Spam: Anyone up for some Final Fantasy Football?

It is easy to identify spam comments because they typically have the following elements:

• It is completely off-topic from the blog post.
  Before this post, our blog had no mentions of Fantasy Football or Final Fantasy.
• It has a lot of keywords that are obviously stuffed into the comment.
  As you can see, there are a bunch of keywords in this comment. They are stuffed into a grammatically-incorrect statement. And they are separated by commas.
• All of the keywords are off-topic from the blog post.
  Again, none of the keywords in this comment relate to the blog post.
• It has a link in the comment.
  This is the tell-tale sign of comment spam: links. Comment spammers use these links to influence search engine rankings. And some comment spammers even use these links as a traffic source.
• It has a link in the name.
  Why stop with links in the body of the comment when you can also link the name field in the comment?
• The email domain is suspicious.
  In this case, the comment was obviously a spam comment. I didn’t even really need to investigate the email address. But the email address can be an indicator of spam comments. For this comment, the email is from yandex.ru, the most popular search engine in Russia. It’s like the Yahoo of Russia. Anyone can get a yandex.ru mail account, so this email is not completely suspicious. However, I have seen comments from info@gmail.com, and that is definitely a fake email address.
  

Now you know about Comment Spam. It’s purpose is to generate links, higher rankings for keywords, and traffic from our blog. The bad news is that people still use this technique for link building. And even worse, they only do it because it works. It’s definitely not something we do or recommend to our clients. Anyways, the point of this blog post is to teach you what to look for. Mission accomplished. Right?