A few days ago I got this comment on our cheap flights post …

Don´t forget to check www.weefly.com,
it searches the cheapest deal especially if you wish to find the cheapest weekend to travel and it compares multiple cities! So far WEEFLY.com is the best.
Nick

then precisely one minute later…

Nick, I agree.
www.weefly.com found me a weekend to London for £23.
Cheers
Monica

If you’re going to post shill comments and talk to yourself to promote your own site, at least do it some time apart and from a different IP. Not very good timing either since shill commenting and shady promotion tactics are in the spotlight at the moment.

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What is your personal comment moderation policy on your blog or website? Do you trim the comments to the most relevant or do you allow anything to be posted (even short comment spam)? I guess most people have their own personal rules when it comes to figuring out what to let through and what to delete or mark as spam.

I started thinking about this topic earlier today after deleting some nasty comments off one my other blogs. The commenter was being an ass so I decided to change the policy and delete anything that’s rude or useless.

This was also helped by what I read in the comments of a TechCrunch post today. There were more personal attacks on there than I’m used to seeing and it sort of ruined the discussion (which is often insightful).

It’s a fine line between allowing free speech and making sure that your blog doesn’t end up being perceived as too negative or useless. YouTube is probably the best example of a comment system that’s so filled with crap that it’s become almost completely useless. Digg is a good example of a mix. A lot of comments on there are really intelligent but a lot of them also make YouTube look like Masterpiece Theater. I can’t think of any sites that are the other extreme – where the comments are always quality – maybe Copyblogger or SEOmoz.

Also, it’s good to keep in mind the legal issues. This post on blogger law (see #7) recommends having a privacy policy and a terms of use page to let people know that you reserve the right to edit, modify, or delete comments. It claims that by default, you do not have the right to “edit” a post, although I’m sure deleting them is always fine. If there are any intellectual property attorneys out there, maybe you can help us out here.

So, are you a comment nazi or a comment hippie?

(photo credit: zen)

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This morning I got a new kind of comment I had not seen before:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments, I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Wow. That’s definitely a new one. I think my favorite part is “I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site”. It seems Richard is implying that he personally knows all the spammers who are responsible for 30-50% of spam comments worldwide.  This makes me want to buy Richard a t-shirt for being so clever and coming up with such an innovative link extortion scheme.

Actually this might be “link blackmail” more than “link extortion”. I’m too busy deleting spam comments to lookup the right definition.

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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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Last week Matt Cutts talked about hidden links and illustrated a case of what was a pretty blatant attempt to hide links within text.

This morning I surfed over to MichaelSaunders.com (a brokerage here in Sarasota) and saw that their footer area is full of keyword-laden text. If you mouse-over the paragraphs you will see that a large number of the keywords in text are actually links to different parts of the Michael Saunders website. The text links are made to blend in completely with the rest of the paragraph. It appears that the links are there solely for search engines and not users of the site.

This case is obviously different from the spammy example Matt mentions in his post. The links do appear on mouse-over (as opposed to not at all) and they are used mostly for internal linking (not outbound links). However, it still appears that it’s created for SEO and not end user benefit.

So my question is: does the Michael Saunders example constitute search engine spam? Or is it within the Google quality guidelines to hide your links (except on mouseover) as long as you’re not linking out?

04/17/07 Update: I changed the title of this post from “spamming Google” to “violating the google guidelines” since that’s probably more accurate in this case.

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I’m a pretty big fan of Mybloglog and I really like using it, but I see some significant problems that may end up spelling its demise if the MBL/Yahoo crew don’t make the necessary changes soon enough.

1. Security issues – Shoemoney has covered two of them and I’m sure more exist. One is a flaw that lets anyone hijack your “top 5 links” to enter in their own spammy keyword-laced links. Another is a way that uses a MyBlogLog cookie exploit to make people seem like they author websites (when they in reality do not). To me, the entire cookie-based system has some worrying implications beyond this, but I won’t get into that here.

2. “The Myspace problem” – I think bloggers are far less tolerant of visual garbage than the “MySpace crowd”. Currently MyBlogLog allows animated gifs as avatars and has no apparent file size limits. Here’s an example of an avatar that is not only distracting, but weighs in at 735 Kb – That’s huge! That will slow down the loading time of any blog where that member visits. MyBlogLog either needs to disallow animated gif’s altogether or allow publishers to select an option that allows them to prevent animated gifs from showing.

3. Spam – I’ve seen a lot more “racy” photos crop up thoughout the web as people are catching onto the “sex sells” method. These are photos of beautiful (and “under-dressed”) women that seldom have anything to do with the actual visiting member. This spam issue is also closely related to #1 and #2 above and even though it may not be perceived as harmful by some – I think it degrades the original purpose of MyBlogLog and introduces too much noise into the system. If it goes on unchecked, it might erode the way people perceive the system over time.

If MyBlogLog does not address these and any other problems soon after they arise , they may end up becoming the next Friendster.

Update: Seems like a lot of prominent bloggers are talking about comment spam, author hacks, and other My Blog Log issues today – John Chow, Darren Rowse, Danny Sullivan. This is a huge issue for MBL – they better get into reputation management mode, plug the holes, and respond to every one of these posts before this starts to snowball. As of this morning MBL’s blog says they’ve fixed the co-author problem – which is good to see – but what about the other issues?

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Yesterday Jason Calcanis gave a keynote speech at SES where he stirred up quite a bit of controversy. I still can’t decide if he’s a pompous asshat who creates controversy by virtue of his own ignorace or a brilliant marketer who stirs the pot intentionally to create buzz. Either way, he is once again the center of attention. Allen at CenterNetworks has the audio (I’m always very impressed by Allen’s coverage of events) of Jason’s speech so you can judge by yourself.

At one point Jason Calacanis said “SEO is bullshit” which offended quite a few people. Call me old fashioned but I think it’s kind of disrespectful to insult an entire room of people (this is after all, a “search engine strategies” conference). If you listen to his speech, you’ll quickly realize that he is VERY ignorant about the field of SEO. He unfairly characterizes the entire SEO field as a snake oil business. He might as well have said that anyone who uses email marketing is a spammer. Blanket characterization of an industry is plain ignorant.

Later in the speech he talked about using editors at Netscape to weed out spam. (Netscape is basically a bad copy of Digg). Well at Digg, it works like this – if people find value in the post, they digg it. If they think it’s spam, they bury it. It’s a democratized system and the funny/helpful/useful submissions make it to the front page. What Calcanis is basically saying is, “I think the users at Netscape are too stupid to figure out what’s spam, so we’ll tell them.” He gives an example for “25 Refinancing Tips” as being obvious spam. But Jason, what if these tips are actually useful enough to a majority of the people? It’s really arrogant to assume that you know best and shows a real lack of respect for your users.

I personally think Jason Calcanis cannot see past his own ego and really has very little respect for anyone other than Jason Calacanis.

Oh, and before you call me out, yes the interspersed misspelling of Jason’s last name is intentional. After all, spelling is bullshit. Much like SEO.

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Well, not really – but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing – how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.

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One of our small sites got a massive spike in traffic and conversions starting last weekend and looking at logs we were scratching our head about where this bounty was coming from.

Since 80% of that traffic was direct, we pondered that someplace must have given out our text link and people were copy and pasting it in. We figured that whoever was sending that much “copy/paste” traffic must have MASSIVE traffic themselves – at first we thought a popular news site or something similar.

Several days later, we realized what was happening. Our page was scraped by a spammer and mashed up with tons of other scraped content, remixed, and thrown out to thousands if not millions of spam pages, all using the subdomain trick, which apparently none of the 3 SE’s have patched yet.

So thank you, Jose P. from Rio, for spamming the hell out of the search engines with your .org subdomains, and letting us ride your wave to the bank. And if you’re wondering where the title comes from, check out this amusing and ongoing story from Greywolf’s blog.

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This morning I was spammed by Shark Byte Media and their new project, LuxuryHomesofSarasota.com. I’ve never signed up for anything from these people and a huge pet peeve of mine is when I get unsolicited email. Especially when it’s marked “High Importance”, which is just too arrogant and annoying. Furthermore it took me only about 3 seconds to figure out that the copy on their pages is the same as 2 other realtors’ websites.

To recap: if you want to draw the ire of the web community, harvest a bunch of email addresses, spam them with a “high importance” header, and put up a site with copied content. The beauty of the web is that it’s so transparent – if you do anything like this, it’s bound to come back and Byte you in the rear.

I hope none of the “real” Sarasota realtors signs up for this thing. There are a number of great Sarasota realtors and brokereages that sell truly luxury homes, just don’t see them using this website.

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