I’ve been seeing a lot of short spam comments bypass Akismet’s spam filters on this blog lately. This type of blog spam is a rather clever way to deceive the less-astute bloggers who don’t realize that it’s spam and approve the comment because it’s perceived as marginally relevant, only because it’s so general and vague.

This is one word blog spam that says something like:

  • “excellent” or
  • “great post”or
  • “i agree”
  • “nice”

Then the URL is a spammy backlink and email is made up. By the fact that I’m seeing so many of these get through, I’m guessing they’re effective.

I’ve always wondered why so many splog creators and spammers took the “hello, nice site look this” approach followed by a dozen obvious spam links. This fairly new (at least to me) approach seems like an effective way to get around Akismet. Some blog owners take these terse generic comments as reactions (and positive reinforcement) to their posts and approve them, making Akismet think it’s legit. They are also usually wildcard subdomains on random “.info” domains so I imagine that helps them avoid Akismet’s history filters.

Anyone else seeing a rise in this type of blogspam recently?

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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

Brad Mills June 6, 2007 at 2:12 pm

I’ve seen an increase too. Hopefully, Akismet will catch on to it soon.

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Alex June 10, 2007 at 7:06 pm

Thought I’d say hi, cool meeting you at the ProBlogger Event, couldn’t find your email, so thought I’d drop a comment.

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Quadszilla June 10, 2007 at 9:19 pm

Excellent!

;)

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Daehee June 10, 2007 at 10:26 pm

Cool blog, stumbled to it through SEO Black Hat. Anyway, the concepts discussed in your post could be further refined to become SEO poetry. Thanks for sharing.

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Cristian Ciofu June 18, 2007 at 11:44 pm

a lot of people are using this stupid method.

why is that? because they don’t have the brain to give a full argumentative comment to an article.

they only want to promote their site.

the BIG blogs from my country are full with STUPID comments.

the reason? they only want to have their name linked to their address over there. that’s all…

stupid people :(

another thing [sorry for double-comment] – I think is difficult to mark as spam all the 1 word comments… because maybe in an article someone really has to say only one word – and it is not spam. I don’t quite have an example in mind, but it’s always an exception to the rule :)

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Markus June 19, 2007 at 9:51 am

They’re not stupid – they’re actually quite clever – and by that I mean the bots that are actually doing this were programmed by clever people.

But it does piss me off since I have to manually delete a lot of them now.

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Jamie Yukes June 20, 2007 at 7:01 pm

great post

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abadman June 21, 2007 at 6:17 am

Agreed but this is about all that gets in. Many one word nonsense posts escape also.

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Micheal August 29, 2007 at 11:42 am

Great Post :P

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منتديات November 20, 2008 at 2:53 am

Agreed but this is about all that gets in. Many one word nonsense posts escape also.

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Matthew C. Kriner January 17, 2010 at 3:38 pm

Great blog and post, keep it up i will be subscribing to your feed!

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