Top five comment spammer tricks

At Northern Voice (hello, fellow Canadians), Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress is talking about comment spam – Robert Scoble has a write-up. Lately, comment spammers are getting smarter – increasingly using social engineering tricks to convince people their links are legitimate comments and get through the moderation queue. I save the ones that especially amuse me. Here’s my top five comment spammer tricks.

5) Shameless generic flattery. “Hi, I think you are totally right. Great! – Susan.” When you’re a new blogger and you’re sick of no one paying attention to you, having one of these finally show up on your site can be quite exciting – until you click through the URL and realize you’ve just been linked to useless AdSense spammer site purgatory. This sort of thing might work the first time you get it, but not by the third.

4) Appeal to your desire to help out fellow bloggers. “Hi, nice blog how long has it been up? I need to add a blog based on [a link to some god-awful spammy business idea]. I tried install a blog and it went bad. Do you have any tips on installing? Thank you very much.” Again, might work the first time you see it, if you’re nice enough to want to help your fellow humans. I’m not so this one never had a hope in hell.

3) Pretending to share something informative. “I really am impressed by your site. Very original & interesting content. You may also want to check out this resource on [some phrase that contextual ads pay well for].” 95% of the time, the link has nothing to do with the entry. Probably because I don’t write all that much about phentermine. 5% of the time, the comment spammer targets keywords in your blog entry. In that case, it mght just work – if you’re too lazy to click through on the link.

2) Asking a generic question about specific blog infrastructure. “Does this blog provide a subscription feed?” Made me pause the first time I saw it, until I noticed it was for a subdomain of some knockoff apartment listing site. (craigrom.com, burn in hell.) Pretty high chance of success if you’re a helpful sort. I’m sure there’s lots of possible variations out there – “Your Atom feed doesn’t seem to be working.” “My trackback pinger didn’t work so here’s a link.” “You should take a look at [some site], it’s plagarizing your content.”

1) The personalized buttinski. “Dear Greg, I’ve noticed you’re writing about [service or company X]. I’ve actually developed [service or company Y], which is like [company X] but better. It has the following features…. (blah, blah blah) Check it out, you’ll like it.” As automated solutions increasingly fail, this is the future of comment spam – the ’spam by hand’. I get more than a few hand-crafted comments that have only tenuous connections, if any, to the topic at hand – mainly from people trying to launch a competing service.

Primarily these come from little one-man shops who are just flailing about, but there’s one social bookmarking site in particular that seems to comment on everything about social bookmarking, even when it has little to do with them – maybe this is a superficial impression, but for a while I saw their largely-irrelevant comments everywhere I went. I’ve let a few of these comments go through, but I’ve decided not to any more – they’re rude. This blog is a locus for my commercial aspirations, not yours.

I’m looking forward to seeing how a ‘top #’ post performs vs. my usual fare – the genre definitely seems to work for Guy Kawasaki.