Comment-spammers unclear on the concept
March 5, 2007Everybody knows I think comment-spammers are scum of the earth. There’s a special place in hell reserved for them. Still I feel kinda sorry when I notice that some of these spammers are so dumb they don’t spam the right kind of urls.
The reason you spam comments into other people’s blogs is that you’re trying to push traffic to your own site, either directly or by raising the Google PageRank. Fundamentally, the links you insert into other people’s sites have to point back to your whatever it is you’re trying to promote. That’s how you get traffic.
I noticed recently however that a fair number of the spams being caught by Akismet actually link to Google itself. In other words, the comment spammers are trying to insert links back to Google into my blog.
Now that makes no sense whatsoever. That doesn’t help the spammers’ cause at all, it doesn’t drive traffic nor does it help raise the PageRank for whatever it is they are trying to promote.
Basically it’s idiotic, it’s almost like maybe a default setting in the spammer software. They’re supposed to replace the default with the actual url they want to promote but forgot. And so their bot is busily inserting all these worthless links into people’s blogs. Or at least trying to insert–Akismet has faithfully caught and deleted them all so far.