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A guest blog post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, a local advertising company.
I found 25 new comments today when I logged into one of my blogs. Normally, akismet catches the spam, but this spam was particularly believable, even though it didn't make specific reference to the content of the blog post. See here:
I'll bet most people who see comments like this would approve them-- they look so natural and even compliment us. Who doesn't want to approve compliments?
So then I took at look at bestnewspolitics.com, which sounds like a spam domain. It also, at first glance, looks legit-- when you skim the article titles and content. But then if you actually read the articles, you know it's fake. This spammer is far more sophisticated than the auto-generated content you normally see:
And then you notice the ads for adult friendfinder, weight loss, and spammy links all over.
As excellent of a job they've done, they could still improve by:
- Finding images that actually have something to do with the articles.
- Comment spamming by leaving just ONE comment, not 20.
- Having a slightly more professional wordpress theme.
- Generating fake comments on their own blog posts to look natural-- I don't see comments on any of the articles on the site.
- Reducing the number of blogroll links-- there are a few dozen, all with spammy anchor text
What surprises me is that nobody has filed a Google Spam Report on these folks yet. And their content generation is sophisticated enough that it will probably pass Google hand review. As you know, Google employs thousands that follow a checklist to see if a particular site is spammy.
I've seen folks who've created systems that generate fake profiles on twitter, tweeting realistic messages. And then when you check their profile, you see they seem to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, and even seem to be employed part-time. They ask for your forgiveness for the poor English because they are a foreign exchange student or something. So you naturally don't judge the awkward grammar of the auto-content generator.
Pretty clever, eh?
Ironically I read this just after dealing with something more or less the same on mine, only mine was to a forex site!
It does get annoying, especially for low traffic blogs, you think finally I’ve got some comments rolling in – only to realize they’re worthless spam. If you’re feeling evil, strip the URL and approve the comments =P most the time they’re just trying to get on your Top Commentators plugin – that plugin can be a right pain sometimes!
Way to give them a backlink in the post! lol
why not nofollow the link to that domain then?
It seems as though when technology improves, others find ways to use it to their advantage: good and/or bad….I’m sure this is keeping Google on their toes
You know, I have to tell you, I really enjoy this blog and the insight from everyone who participates. I especially like it to be refreshing and less filling that
the other light beer. Just messing with ya.Oh, and btw, congrats on the marriage.
Funny stuff, Dave!
You see Johnny’s “MTV Cribs – Honeymoon Edition” yet?
haha that was pro, you should do a review on spammy sites that you think are good
While they may be sophisticated now, they were downright blatant and transparent a few years ago (obviously spam).
Part of it may be improving technology, but i think most of it is these spammers getting a tiny bit smarter.
regards
Simon
Hey Bryn– whoops, I didn’t intend to give a backlink to that spam site. Good catch! Jonathan, could you fix?
You have got to be kidding me? Spammers can go to that extent? I would have probably just looked at it as a legitimate site. It just goes to show that you have to be careful. As Bryn mentioned, aren’t you doing them a favour with the backlink?
Everyone, this was a guest post. When the author typed out the domain, he didn’t hyper-link it. However, when Jonathan imported it, the CMS took it upon itself to make it a live link.
Some times you just have to stop and read all the URL’s of the comments, I’ve been caught out before. Its when the same lame comment keeps coming up every so often that you spot them.
]Yeah I get the same alot are coming from .ru domains
[...] 7. JonathanVolk.com: Spammers are getting more sophisticated in generating fake sites– here’s one [...]
Most spammers aren’t dumb. Most often they are about return on investment.
In the past having your spam look spammy worked. Now it doesn’t work anymore so spammers have to make their spam look less spammy.
So now there are tools to scrape comments of other people and reuse them, there are tools to populate forums immediately (with only fake people) and there are tools to make the autogenerated blogs look perfectly legit. and lots more.
I’m not saying I approve, just that it only keeps getting harder to notice the difference. In a few years we probably can’t even tell the difference anymore…