By: Tim Nash

Comment spam sucks

It's getting worse too, bloggers are increasingly finding more and more comment spammers in their moderation queues as services like Akismet fail to cope with the sheer quantity and diversity of spam it boils down to individual bloggers to fight what must at times seem like a losing battle. But we all know that most blogs are NoFollowed so don't pass any link juice so why are the spammers doing this?

Mechanics of spam

Do spammers know something we don't after!
Lets look at a normal spam comment.

Now this is quite clearly a spam comment and was picked up by Akismet but the elements of spam are pretty much constant. Targeted keyword for name followed by the primary URL they are promoting (this is a flaw with Wordpress as much as with the spammers and one of the reasons I allow users in comments here to use a web site title.) In the main comment some basic text and the all important links. Not much to it but does it work?

Secrets of spam

In my opening paragraph I clearly stated that we all no nofollows don't pass any juice but of course I was lying! Most SEOs who have done any sort of experimentation with nofollows have come to the conclusion they do indeed pass some sort of link juice (PageRank or whatever you want to call it) in Google and it varies between search engines. The name NoFollow creates the illusion that a search engine would just discount and ignore such links but in reality these links are followed and crawled. So now we have a problem we know that NoFollows certainly are followed and they are crawled, we also know that Google for all its clever and sophistication can still be Google Bombed the question is do NoFollows carry enough weight that if enough of them are used can help improve rankings certainly Spam companies seem to think so?

Comment Spammers geniuses or idiots?

I will get on to the biggest flaw in comment spamming in a minute but why is it that while the entire SEO population is looking at nofollow as some horrible morbid disease or alternatively a clever tool to channel link juice do the spamming community see it as a great opportunity the answer lies in scale. SEOs tend to think of LinkWorth™ (I want to cover this soon to be trademarked ala Fantomaster style metric in another post) that is they tend to try and place a value or metric on a link the more its LinkWorth™ is the more valuable it is to them. The belief being that the higher the authority (we are not talking Papal or above) the more link juice will flow the better the rankings. This makes sense chase high ranking authoritative links and boost them with middle of the road authority links any one who as played any sort of strategy game will see this as a sound winning strategy. Spammers take the locust approach if an SEO is looking for a 100 middle if the road links, the spammer is looking for 10k links and they don't care from where ultimately for them its not authority size that matters but sheer volume. The question is does this tactic work?
The answer is sadly yes. Spamming blogs does in fact return viable results in Google at least in a short term but the sheer quantity of links required is immense and while we grumble about them missing the odd few comments the various Anti Spam systems are on the whole preventing any serious outbreak of automated spam taking rankings unfortunately the spammers no this.

Clever spammers

Their are two magic words that seem to be able to bypass most spam filters when used carefully and with subtle keyword linking even on first glance a typical blogger might approve them these words are "Nice" and "Cool" be afraid of these words when seen on their own. However not to be alarmist lets look at some of the more sophisticated spam techniques used today

• DoFollow lists - Many bloggers myself included do not believe in the idea of NoFollow on blogs I want to thank my commentators and to let them join the conversation with their links and so dofollow links, all be it with a couple of caveats one of which is that a commentator requires 3 comments before their links lose the nofollow attribute. I also avoid putting my name or a badge on the site preferring my readers to discover the fact as a bonus not as a selling point to commentating. That said DoFollows are a nice target for spammers, lists of sites to target are available and if they get their link past the website owner they get an authority link to boost their NoFollowed collection.
• Hand Spam - Most spam is automated and when you are dealing with huge numbers of sites you can understand why, but particularly when dealing with with DoFollow sites spammers take the time to craft their spam more carefully to get it past any human reader and more importantly the CAPTCHAs.
• Trackbacks - Most Blogs accept track/ping backs, messages from other sites that link (or appear) to the blog this has become an ever increasing way to push automated comments as it neatly avoids CAPTCHAs on sites however its major drawback is that large ping requests are easy to monitor and much of this style spam is caught by anti spam systems.
• Contextual Spam - you heard of contextual advertising, well so have spammers creating automated systems that analyse a page before sending it a personalised comment. Problem for the spammers contextual advertising sucks, so do their comments

Many spammers appear to be manual spammers who have access to a DoFollow list and have twigged that many site owners are now using plugins like Lucia Link Love and consequently they post at least 3 manual comments to get their link before moving on. They have however one fundamental flaw in their plan of all the places to spam, SEO Blogs (owned by mad Brits) is a bad idea with terrible consequences.

Companies that Spam Suck

...at reputation management.
The biggest problem with spam is it can have disastrous results just do a Google search for many of these companies to see what I mean. Would you buy from a company that uses spamming as a tactic? People clearly do but why? I personally have no idea how a company can truly believe that it's in their best interest to be called out as a spammer but they do and I'm afraid ultimately comment spamming is going to continue with little or nothing that can be done except the occasional outing by blogs such as this. I have a suggestion for comment spammers and in particularly comment spammers looking to promote their own company. Don't. not on this blog or indeed any SEO blog the repercussions are not pleasant as I'm sure some of these services are finding out.

Update
If this post reads oddly a certain company name has been removed by agreement you.
This post was inspired by Shauns' recent problems