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 }
I’ve seen an increase too. Hopefully, Akismet will catch on to it soon.
Thought I’d say hi, cool meeting you at the ProBlogger Event, couldn’t find your email, so thought I’d drop a comment.
Excellent!
;)
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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 :)
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.
great post
Agreed but this is about all that gets in. Many one word nonsense posts escape also.
Great Post :P
Agreed but this is about all that gets in. Many one word nonsense posts escape also.
Great blog and post, keep it up i will be subscribing to your feed!