Administrative, Media Criticism, Technology and Society

Comment Spam Question

8 Comments

I’ve noticed a new type of comment spam showing up. It’s a link to a post, that’s aggregated with other links to other posts, which may or may not be related, in a blog that consists of nothing else but links.

Here’s an example. This seems to be a blog that is set up for free as part of a larger blog site (in this case, “localferret.com”), with no restrictions. So, two questions. What is the purpose of such a blog? And is there any harm in allowing it to provide links to my site (probably picked up by a bot that simply watches my feed — I get a lot of Russian spam this way), even though they seem pointless? It does, after all, increase my Google and Technorati (and probably other) rankings. All of them are captured for moderation, but I can’t decide whether to approve them or declare them spam.

Any ideas?

8 thoughts on “Comment Spam Question”

  1. Creating all those links also increases the page rank of the page that’s doing to the linking. They can then sell links to other websites, which would increase their standing.

    I’d say to turn them down on principle. Accepting them would help your Google standing I suppose, but you know they’re not genuine.

    Links in comment threads are supposed to be anyway.

  3. I agree with Brock. This looks like a blatant attempt to game the search engines. It’s just going to be noise on your site.

  4. My WordPress Akismet anti-spam plugin flags all of these as possible spam, and I’m inclined to agree. I check some out from time to time, but they really do appear to be efforts to increase search engine attention. I delete them all. ..bruce..

  5. I delete all that crap if the spam filter doesn’t get it first. (I finally turned on Akismet on my last year’s blog, just so I wouldn’t have to delete a bunch of spams from the moderation queue, and by billy it worked. I’m on WordPress.com currently, which already has the spam-filter set up.)

    Anyway, I only allow comments in my posts that actually are replies to my posts, or trackbacks to other sites that are actually run by a person or people who actually have something to say about my posts. I don’t care to raise the page ranks of useless websites that promote products — at least, not for free. Anyone who wants to pay me, oh I don’t know, a thousand bucks a spam, is welcome to use my site as a jumping-off point for their business. Pay up front please.

  7. I’m against all forms of system-gaming on general principle, and comment spam of any kind on several general principles. I’d lose a lot of respect for someone who chose deliberately to tolerate it.

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