Being a newbie that just set up my first online blog in Apr this year, I was naturally pleasantly surprised when I received my first reader comment from one of my daily writeups. I replied to him and thanked the person for his feedback and encouraging words.
Subsequently, I started to receive more comments on the same blog writeup and I started getting suspicious about it. Firstly, the email addresses all seemed to be coming from a generic source (mailcatch.com) and the IP addresses were identical. Secondly, the comments were beginning to sound unrealistic and ridiculous – I was just talking about something simple in that blog and the reader seems to think that they were earth-shattering insights. To date, I had received about 30 such spams on the same blog page. Who the hell was so free to do this and what is the hidden agenda?
On further investigations, I was enlightened by helpful writeups from the web (added the link of one of them below). Bottomline, these robo-comments were normally auto-generated by certain spam software to try to game the system to help increase views to their own sites. They are also trying to trick Google to rank their sites favourably as the comments allow them to leave their URL link on my blog. Google judges the popularity of URLs by measuring the number of external pages pointing to itself. The technical name for this is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
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“When Google, or any other search engine, decides which websites to place at the top of a list of search results, one of the factors it considers is the number of links pointing to the site. A page that has many links from other places on the web (these are called “inbound links”) will rank more highly in the search results than a page that has only a few links. Web pages with many inbound links are more popular, and therefore Google concludes that those pages are more likely to have the information that a user is looking for.”
“Spam comments are a way to “game the system” by randomly blasting comments into the web in order to get as many links to your site as possible. Some of these will be deleted by attentive (and irritated) editors and administrators, and some of them will be filtered out automatically by spam filter programs. But some will get through, and the more that do, the more inbound links your website will have, and the higher the search engines will place your site in search results.”
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So how do I stop them? I can’t. While WordPress does a good job of sieving out most of the unwanted spam at the moment, some still do get through. Spammers will disguise the comments with genuine human like sentences. We have to keep the gate open, as a real reader’s comment may actually happen. For now, I guess I would have to vet all the comments that come through and tag them as spam manually…
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/3191/revealed-the-grubby-world-of-comment-spam/
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