Someone has hit 25 posts here at Classical Values with comments seemingly advertising Google:
i come from best search engine http://www.google.com
I deleted one comment that was attached to a recent post of mine, and as I wondered why someone would flood a site with comments like these it hit me: could it be to fool bloggers into adding google to the Blacklist, which filters spam content?
Tricky business. A google search turns up more than 400 comments by this pest.
Anyone think I’m right about the motive, or care to correct my thesis?
Comments
6 responses to “A new kind of blog spam?”
I’m getting them too, I almost blacklisted out of habit, but I caught myself. Seems like it’s exactly what you suggest, an attempt to get people blacklist Google.
–Jason
If they weren’t so obvious we might not have caught it (i.e., they could have hidden Google among a mass of malicious links).
This is a good reminder to read all of the URLs carefully when despamming our blogs.
I’ve gotten some for Yahoo as well. Even more annoying, I’ve gotten an incredible amount of spam with no links at all lately.
MT-Blacklist is quite forgiving of such mistakes. Any word or URL added mistakenly can be deleted from the list. A number of times, the URLs in junk comments have been written in such a way as to make me blacklist all periods or commas. Stuff like that has to be watched, but it can always be undone.
(I deleted the “google” comments without using MT.)
BTW, the most useful feature of MTBlacklist is its ability to block words. Simply adding “p-o-k-e-r” has caused over 4500 comments to be blocked.
(Had to spell out the word or otherwise I couldn’t have left this comment!)
I am knocking on wood as I type this, but I finally got sick of the spam that was still making it through MT-Blacklist and SpamLookup (killed most trackback spam) and installed SCode — a simple Turing test that requires commenters to type a 6-digit number to post. It’s done a complete number on comment spam and cut the time I spend dealing with spam way, way down (although, amazingly, once in awhile people actually enter spam by hand).
Highly recommended. (Hope I didn’t curse myself.)