How Woopra Catches Drive-by Comment Spammers

Today someone left the following comment:

Now, it caught my eye for two reasons:

1. They left a URL in the comment. I’m constantly on the lookout for that because I don’t want YOU guys (my real readers) to be subjected to spammy comments.
2. They claim to be a long time reader who visits constantly.

So I figured that if they visit as much as they say they do, I’d see some verification of that in my Woopra stats. I pulled it up and did a quick search based on the IP address that the comment came from. Here is what we find:

Let’s break it down:

• They arrived at my blog by doing a Google search for the keywords “australian comedy blog”.
• Woopra only finds their visiting address having been on my site one single time. Although its possible that they visited previously from a different IP address, I highly doubt it.
• They spent a total of 4 minutes on the site – including posting the comment. And the video alone is 2 minutes. It takes about another minute to read the page.

So, what we really have here is someone just doing a search and finding high ranking blogs so they can leave a comment and drop their URL in the hopes that some innocent visitors will click through to THEIR website.

This kind of drive-by commenting adds no value whatsoever, and is only intended to hijack visitors. So, if you have a Website I would encourage you to look out for these things and mark them as spam when you see them.