The War on Comment Spam

Have you had an increase in general spam on your sites lately?

For some reason all my sites are getting more spam in the akismet spam folder. I’m using the bad behavior plugin, and I’ve been using it since February. The bad behavior plugin greatly reduced the amount of spam that was even reaching my akismet spam folder. Since February I went from having 500 spam a day per site (well my sites with fairly high traffic) to only one to ten spam per day thanks to the bad behavior plugin.

Lately though, I’ve found that I’ve been getting more and more spam in my spam folder and some that’s not even being picked up by akismet. Either akismet isn’t working quite as well as it used to or some thing’s changed out there.

Enough about spam that’s being generated by bots and hopefully being caught by akismet or whatever system we have in place to catch it. The spam that has continued to upset me throughout the summer has been human generated comment spam on my do follow blogs.

The other day I had one persistent comment spammer. This person left very lame comments “nice photo”, “I agree”, “I’m not in AUS” and so on, on two of my blogs. Lame comments are one thing, but this person left about 16 of these comments on the two sites and left links for two different businesses. In one of the SEO type keyword links were the words (use this as much as possible) beside the keyword Teeth Whitener. So the comment looked like this:

Teeth Whitener (use this as much as possible)
Nice photo!

I’m assuming that the line use this as much as possible was instructions to use that keyword as much as possible because in later comments other words were added to the keyword phrase.

I use Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin now so people have to leave a certain amount of comments before their links will follow. I love that plugin. Ever since I began using it the human generated comment spam has reduced greatly. I think this person was attempting to leave enough comments to qualify for links that followed.

I was angry at this persons blatant attempt to spam my sites, so you know what I did? I visited the two companies that he or she had attempted to leave links for and found their contact page. I then left them a comment that said something like this:

Have you recently paid a company to leave your links in the comment section of blogs? If you have, this company is doing your business a disservice.

In the last 24 hours someone left 16 comments on two of my blogs with links to your business and another business. The comments were left on fairly lengthy and detailed blog posts yet the comments were most often only two words such as “nice photo” or one line comments that didn’t make much sense.

Here’s an example of the comments that were left on my sites:

Example that includes keyword for link, ip address, commenter’s email address and comment

I’ve deleted all the comments left by this person, so if you’ve paid to have links added to blogs you’ve just wasted your money.

Other bloggers have stated they’ve been receiving these types of comment links as well and they’ve also been deleting them. I think you’d have much more success advertising your company if you approached individual bloggers directly or created an advertising campaign. You’d have links within articles if you did that and links within articles are much more highly regarded by search engines.

Since the comment spammer left their email address I also sent them a note asking them why they were spamming my site and I told them that I’d contacted the companies for which they’d left links. I also warned them that they might soon be out of a job if the companies stopped buying comment links.

So far neither business nor comment spammer have replied.

If you’ve also been getting comment spam similar to the kind that I’ve discussed in this article please feel free to follow my lead by contacting the companies who’s links have been left in your posts comment section. You can copy the letter that I wrote above and simply paste it into a businesses contact form. This should save you some time. Be sure to include an example of the type of lame comment spam you were bombarded with when the spammer hit your site.

Who knows, maybe the company you contact will reply to your note and ask you to write a blog post for them.