Comment spam, a common form of spamdexing, has been a longstanding problem for blogs of all kinds. In search of “quick and easy backlinks” some people engage in it themselves, others hire “blog commenters” for as little as a couple hundred of bucks month (many which actually call themselves “SEO experts” and sell their services as “search engine optimization”), but the nature of this annoying tactic doesn’t change. It still has the word SPAM written across it.
For many bloggers — including those of us who use WordPress — Akismet has been a real savior from comment spam. However, no tool is 100% perfect, and every once in a while a totally kosher comment lands in that “Spam” folder. To whitelist those good comments, it is good to make it your routine to check that spam folder every once in a while. I do it nearly daily. Every time I do I find some pretty entertaining spam comments. Today I thought it’d be fun to show some of them to you.
Here we go:
Puzzling wording:
An interesting dialogue is value comment. I think that it is best to write more on this subject, it may not be a taboo topic however generally people are not sufficient to speak on such topics.
Nothing else to add:
Nice informations for me. Your post has helpful. I wish to has valuable posts like yours in my blog. How do you find these posts?
A “***** enlargement” comment (at least they’re being honest!!)
It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website [url here]
No, no… No “mistake” there, baby!
Hi I discovered your webpage by mistake when i was searching Google…
Huh?!
Wonderful web page! I’ve a inquery to all who were born or perhaps expecting August 1 leap years or August 2 common years. What exactly do you think about this specific video: [link here]
What funny ones have you come across while blogging?
I remember that some of the spammy comments seemed funny when I first set up WordPress, but lately they’ve just been annoying. My two most common categories are “vague or generic comments” (usually with just one link) and “incomprehensible gibberish” (usually with many links to sites with alphabet-soup domains (ajsdfuyehfdgkfdiwjmcvyywe.com).
So far, I don’t think any “genuine” comments on either of my blogs has been flagged by Akismet. I still check before flushing the spam folder, just in case.
I have noticed a substantial surge in spammy blog-comments in the past week, since the Google Panda/Farmer update ( http://www.abestweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142478 ).
Mark, thank you for your comment. Yes, a ton of the ones I get are nonsensical “gibberish” too… However, some good ones do get flagged as “spam” every other day or so.
Interesting info re the surge of spammy blog comments over the past week. I haven’t seen much difference, but still…
From time to time, when I spot a generic comment which says positive stuff, I remove the website url, edit the email address and still post it 😀
Hmm…I can’t recall any funny ones…they all annoy me to no end. 🙂
Thanks for this Geno! What I have also been seeing is “LinkedIn Discussion Spam”, not shameless self-promotion–because there is a lot of that already, but we share relevant articles and discussions with groups, and yesterday I saw the same spamdexing comment to 4 different groups.
At least your post made me smile and feel that we can all at least share in the pain…. 😉
Oh, that LinkedIn “discussion” spam!! I used to see plenty of it in the Affiliate Program Management group that I have on LinkedIn. Instituting group rules, and enforcing them (in the instances when even carefully pre-screened new members break them) has helped me a lot there.
And now, I thought I would share my first ever “Twitter Spam”… Today the RingRevenue account and my personal twitter account got spammed with a tweet that said, “Will you give us an interview?”. Clicking on the link takes me to a who-hub page with little to know information. Is nothing sacred? there is already enough junk to filter through on twitter without having to deal with it coming as a DM to our twitter accounts.
Here is what the twitter spam looked like:
https://skitch.com/gnemechek/ri23j/tweetdeck-1
I hate people using a automated blog finder to search for blogs to comment on and spamming the same generic comment to each of them, such as the examples you have given. My personal favourite is “This post doesn’t load properly in Firefox.” 🙂
Its so obvious and annoying, thank you Askismet! 🙂
I can’t stop laughing to read this one :
“It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website [url here]”