My last post got a comment which seemed legit at first, pointing out that I had been mentioned in a Daily Kos diary. When I checked my stats, it indeed seems that I was mentioned–but the link did not lead to any real story. That means that the story which referenced me was deleted for some reason–or this was perhaps one of the most clever spam attacks I have experienced.

Already I am pretty sure that the comment itself was spam: the link was to a commercial news site, and the text was terse and standardized enough to seem automated–it mentioned my “research,” which is an awkward way of referring to what I wrote, but is general enough to apply to a wide variety of situations. Not to mention that what I wrote wasn’t much as “research” goes. And the compliment “Great work” is a classic standard in spam comments. So I get the impression that spammers are now scouring the popular sites for links to individual blogs, and leaving spam links to themselves in the form of notifications about how people have been mentioned on popular sites. Pretty clever just at that, you have to admit: such links will be appreciated by bloggers, who like to know when they get mentioned somewhere else, especially somewhere in the spotlight. They usually won’t question that kind of comment, and won’t delete it as spam. So the link gets preserved instead of deleted, and that’s a great plus for the spammer.

But the broken link to the Daily Kos diary makes me wonder if there ever was a Daily Kos link to my page in the first place. How many Daily Kos diaries get deleted like that? Maybe it was just that, but my recent headaches with referral spam suggested something different. Referral spam can pretend that people are coming to your site from a link that does not exist. They simply tell your referral logs, “I’m coming from this address,” and your logs accept it. Which means that the 39 visits from the Daily Kos address could just as easily have been referral spam generated by the same entity that spammed the comment. If that is the case, and I’m not just being overly paranoid, you would have a combination spam that would generate a very convincing illusion of legitimacy to a blogger.

I’ll have to keep my eyes open to see if this kind of thing occurs elsewhere. In the meantime, the comment still stands, though the spam link has been removed.