Short Comment Spam in Akismet

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?