Comment Spam: Phentermine, Xanax and Blackjack

Posted by SEO Dave on May 31st, 2006 at 11:32am

Phentermine, Xanax and Blackjack is apparently what most of my readers are into according to the comments “Spam Karma 2″ and “Akismet” (two Wordpress comment spam plugins) are catching

Here’s a recent one I find funny-

Name: phentermine online | E-mail: phentermine @ mail.uk | URI: ####### phentermine-online-swicki.eurekster.com/ | IP: 82.146.42.206 | Date: May 29, 2006

I found your work a little stiff, you need to involve your acute artistic sensibilities, that you indeed have, and, your photos reflects, the dicipline of composicion, an important tool that will make you master of your skills. rosa maria

I could see someone missing this as spam, but both Wordpress plugins caught this one which is presumably because of the keyword phentermine in the URI.

Interestingly comment spam like this-

Name: casinos | URI: ####### online-casino.20me.com/ | IP: 211.48.62.59 | Date: May 20, 2006

casinos…

casinos gambling for fun and money is the sence of gamblers life casino gambling for fun and money is the sence of gamblers life online gambling learn casino rules online at gambling portals …

Gamblers apparently aren’t good spellers either, what is sence

Isn’t the norm for my blog, looks like most of the automated comment spammers have learned loading the text of a comment with their keywords results in their comment being caught easily so they add what looks like a real comment and just spams the one backlink.

I comment spammed a few years back just prior to it becoming a blog epidemic so I guess I owe a blanket apology to any bloggers, guestbook or forum owner (or other sites) I spammed for backlinks.

I humbly apologise, sorry

The reasons I comment spammed are no different to why our Phentermine, Xanax and Blackjack (oh my) friends are spamming my blog today, it’s money. If a comment spammed link counts as a backlink to Google the site gains valuable PR/link benefit which increase it’s SERPs over time.

For example in a short period of time using link spamming techniques I managed to take my new online Lingerie business from a trickle of organic traffic per day to up to 8,000 unique visitors per day just before Google banned it (presumably for comment spamming) November 2004 and now it languishes at around 1,000 visitors per day with traffic mostly from Yahoo and MSN (lingerie traffic is very low quality, so 1,000 visitors isn’t enough to run a successful business, so that sites gone affiliate now).

You’ll note my site was banned from Google, that’s what you risk if you comment spam, don’t believe anyone who tells you comment spamming is risk free because Google can’t possibly link the spam directly to your site, a competitor could have made those comment spammed links and so it would be unethical for Google to ban your site!

It is quite easy now to find banned sites that have comment spammed, look up the MT-Blacklist (A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin) and check the backlinks on both Google and Yahoo for a random sample of black listed sites.

You will find quite a lot are low or no PR despite thousands of spammed backlinks on Yahoo (Google banned them).

So if you care about the long term success of your site don’t comment spam, there are much better ways to gain traffic that work long term (building content is the best approach). Also comment spamming is a full time job (though easier now there are automated scripts) and so to keep the links/PR you’ll be link spamming indefinitely!

Goggle is also getting better at dealing with link spammers for example the now infamous sandbox effect is almost certainly a side effect of comment spamming (and purchasing links). Google now delays links benefit, so a link added today won’t pass significant link benefit for around 9 months (possibly as long as a year) even though the Google toolbar shows the correct PR at the next update (very misleading). Since spammed links tend to have a short life span (at least on high PR pages) link spammers will find it an up hill struggle to build up enough link benefit to rank high.

Although controversial the rel=”nofollow” attribute gives bloggers the option to prevent link benefit from passing to commenters links. Unfortunately this also hurts legitimate commenters caught in the crossfire. Though I’m finding I could remove this attribute from Wordpress since the plugins I’m using have so far caught all but one spammed comment and that one was clearly manually created.

Might regret this, but I’d be interested in comments from link spammers! Particularly interested to hear from those who have been link spamming for years, are you finding the spammed links are not helping as quickly/as much as they used to? When I link spammed (in 2003) I found the links made a significant difference in as little as 10 weeks, but links today (not spammed) are taking up to a year or more to work!!!

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