Spam Comments

Spam Comments: Blatant marketing ploy? We see that all the time.

Anyone who has a blog is occasionally (or not so occasionally) plagued by spam comments. Most are easy to detect and they usually deal with products designed to make certain parts of you bigger, or the whole of you smaller.

Sometimes things come through that make you wonder if the commenter is just link-mining, or really has no clue.

For example. I received two comments last week (I alluded to this on twitter) from the same IP and email, but different Author names. The first comment said:

A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….where is your RSS button ?

That is usually code for “I’m commenting on your blog just so there’s a link with my website’s name on it”. Especially because they’re looking for my RSS button. Ummm…it’s right there, dude.

But, ten minutes later, another comment came in which made me question the spam rating of the first. Sort of.

I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.

I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again.

Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed.

Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!

The first comment seems like a standard Spam Robo-Comment, but the second seems like someone was alerted that their first robo-comment would be dumping into a blog that uses the “nofollow” on comment links (this is specifically to reduce this sort of search engine spam) and decided to up the pressure and throw a bit of passive-aggressive on top for kicks.

Of course, the request for me to stop using nofollow is a dead giveaway. The sop to my ego about a successful blog would fit the formula “tell them something good, then bad, then good” except that they started off by threatening to never come back to my blog. To top off the fun part, their comments are on a post from November, 2005 and one from January, 2008. These posts do have Astrophotography in common, but the first comment, the one that said “A fantastic read….very literate and informative.” was on a post that was really just me linking to Badastronomy.

So, we’ve got a big thumbs down all around. However, I will say that they responded to my email about whether these were Spam comments. They gave me permission (thanks!) to edit the comments in any way I chose. They’ve obviously not read my comments policy.

I approved their comments this time, just to give me something to talk about, but if they come through again in a similar fashion, I think we’ll be spamming them with prejudice.