Comment Spammers Get Sneaky, But You Should Delete Them Ruthlessly!
You guys have heard me drone on and on about my hatred of Spammers. I really mean it when I say I want to shoot them. Like with a real gun. In Texas. (Yee-haw)
Anyway, some people seem to think that they are not spammers as long as they leave a nice sounding comment along with their spammy “made-for-adwords” website link. And I guess they even think it’s ok for them to use different names on different comments… and different spammy MFA website links.
Another Spammy Example
In fact, here is an example of someone who used 4 different domains and two different names when leaving comments. Of course, they didn’t take into account the fact that they have the same damn IP address on every comment (all of which have now been deleted).
Oh, by the way, normally I would feel bad about putting someone’s name or email address up in an image, but since I don’t believe the names are real anyway, I have no sympathy.
By the way, before anyone points out to me that we could be dealing with multiple different people behind some sort of proxy server, let me point out that:
- This doesn’t explain away the same URL with two different names…
- I verified all this in Woopra too.
Why This Is So Very Wrong
The thing is, comments existing here ON MY BLOG for only one purpose. To facilitate discussion between people. But those who come here using fake names and linking to spammy blogs are clearly, clearly, clearly only doing so to attempt to sucker other people in clicking through to THEIR sites in the hopes of making money off of them.
There are many people out there advising bloggers to go and leave comments on other, more popular bloggers, websites. And this is not really bad advice – as long as it’s taken properly! The goal is NOT to fill popular blogs with spammy comment links! (The whole God-damn world is not about siphoning cash from your fellow man!) The goal is to try and develop some sort of a relationship with that person so that you can get them to take an interest in what you are doing and occasionally link to your material or offer assistance in some other way.
But there are so many people who just don’t get it… And to illustrate this point, right now there are about 14,250 bonafied comments on this blog, while Akismet has caught 440,000 spam comments. Over 97% of the comments left are spam! And in order to make sure that real readers want to participate in a site’s conversations, you better delete the hell out of anything that looks fishy. I do.
Bottom line: if you can’t walk up to me in public and introduce yourself with your real name, and have me know something about you personally from the link you left on my site, then your comment is suspect. In fact, I do not want any link from you unless IT TELLS ME EXACTLY WHO YOU ARE! And for God’s sake, I even spell that out clearly in the rules, which you spammers just don’t bother to take seriously.
So shape up, or kiss off.
One email per post. Twenty years of this, still going. Unsubscribe whenever.
it’s “bona fide”, two words.
I feel a little bit better seeing your stats of comment spam. I get about 98% in spam comments on my SEO blog. It got so bad that I shut comments off, altogether. Then, I was contacted by some of my readers and they said that a blog isn’t a blog, if they don’t allow comments. So, that made me think a bit more on the whole problem. Then, I decided to make people register. I got some comments, but that wasn’t the solution either.
Next, I did a brain storm session. I contacted my PHP coder and had him code a WordPress plugin for me, called “Open Post.” I set my blog back to register only to post, because the plugin allows me to open any post that I want up for discussion. So, this allows me to test the water, so to speak. I have allowed people to comment for the last couple of months. However, it is the same ballgame all over. Spam City!
I have quite a few plugins to detect spam comments and hard coded statements in my .htaccess file to block certain things like proxy servers. That has helped alot. However, for some reason people think they can leave a generic comment that has no value to the discussion and I’ll approve it. Wrong! I won’t do that.
I would rather have no comments, if I had to settle for spammy comments. I want a blog where people come for my content and want to learn about improving their search engine rankings. I want people to communicate with me and each other and experience what real blogging is about.
Many people call me old fashion and that a comment is a comment and it is traffic. However, I want targeted traffic and I am not interested in making my blog look bigger than life by allowing traffic of any type to pump up my Alexa rankings.
Call me what you want, but this is who I am and I don’t see me changing my ways for spammers.
Spammy comments are most of the times automaticaly generated. Alive websites delete spam but unused blog or overbooked webmaster may let them go.
hopefully, in the near future, they will come up with some software which is even better at eliminating such trash from our sites. Every single day, i still get tons of crap spam all over my sites even with askimet and other plugins installed. It seems like it is becoming a waste of time to sign into my blogs and see that i have new comments only to see that they are spam.
You know spammers have a particular way of talking, they always say in a tone like I agree with you and I feel the same and the likes. Its so easy to make out who is spamming, LOL.
Thank you for the wonderful article. I also hate spams John and I always delete this comments. They are simply wasting there time visiting my site even if the traffic is very low.
Thanks for the guidance. I have this same problem and don’t even have that much traffic. I used to belabor whether or not to delete these type of comments since I have so few. Now I’ll trash them with a vengeance.
John,
I couldn’t agree with you more. My blog traffic is much smaller than yours, but I still get a tremendous number of spam comments. And while Askimet deals with them, I’m always worried a legitimate comment will get buried in the spam and I’ll miss it.
What puzzles me is why this keeps happening. I hardly ever see spam comments get through on the blogs I read. So why do they keep trying? Are they coming from bots that someone forgot to turn off?
I enjoy your posts. Keep ’em coming.
Ed