New Type of Comment Spam
Last night I was hit by several dozen spam comments that exhibited a new type of behaviour. The comments were praising the usual stuff you don't want to buy, but the links were to real blogs!
I'm not sure how this would help the spammers, I can only imagine that this is a way to get us to start blocking eachothers url's. Is this an attempt to aim vandalism at what makes blogging worthwile: the networks we form?
Ah, wait no it isn't: the blogentries linked to, are blogentries that contain the original spam comments we know. So this is an attempt to googlebomb. Spam site A with hollow compliments and linking to your gambling outfit or whatever. Then spam site B, linking to Site A with your gambling outfit as a link description. As Google takes into account how links are described this might give you an edge in Google. So now, the google-weight of site A is deployed to boost the spam term used in site B's comments. And since site A links to the spammers home base it gets associated with it. Or something like that.
[Update] Jay Allen of MT Blacklist writes about this too.
Ton, This has actually been going on for a while, and the gambling ring is one of those that have been doing it more aggressively. For a real kick, you might try logging into their mt.cgi. There was one that set up Movable Type and never bothered to change the default login/password (melody/nelson).
Jack,
I think I haven't been clear enough. It is not that spammers open blogs, and then link to them in my comments. It's that first they spam the comments of a normal blog (without mentioning gambling, but linking to their gambling site), and then spam my comments linking to that normal blog that contains the spam comments (mentioning gambling in the link description but the link itself is to the normal blog).
Posted by: Ton Zijlstra at July 31, 2004 11:46 AM
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