Blog Comment Spam
You know, I think I’ve just been blog-comment spammed. I hadn’t heard of this before, but a quick Google shows it’s not new or unique here.
I get comments to any of my posts automatically emailed back to me, and upon hearing the “ding!” from my email program, I went to read it… and it looked suspicious.
The post the comment was made in was one of my old, quick photo entries on a Costco shopping trip (Costcos are relatively new to Japan).
First, I noted that the name that had been entered was “juicers,” which was one of the products in my cart. So I looked at the link that the person had left behind, and saw that it was a page on a web shop for juicers. I had mentioned buying a juicer in the text.
Then I looked carefully at the comment:
I heard that Costco wants to open 50 branches in Japan over the next 10 years too.. I bet it is true!
In a response I had made to another poster in my comments area, I had previously written:
[…] I heard that Costco wants to open 50 branches in Japan over the next 10 years, […]
And so noted that the wording was exactly the same. I also noted that this page is often hit by search engines. I may be mistaken, but I have the feeling that someone has a spam program that searches for products sold by the company mentioned in posts, and when it locates a blog entry, looks for ways to comment in a seemingly human form–in this case, probably looking for the words “I heard that” among others, then just copied the text up to the next punctuation mark, and added the “too.. I bet it is true!” at the end. Could be completely mechanical.
In any case, I deleted the URL and email just in case this was spam; the comment is still there, as it alone makes no reference to the spammer or any URLs.
Still, this is kind of disturbing. Will I have to start putting spam filters on my blog comments?
A few pages talking about these things and reactions to them are here, here, here, and here.
Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of comment spamming. I haven’t looked for a while, but last time I checked the usual way the spammer found me was by a Google related: search from the previous blog that they spammed. “juicers” is vaguely related to Costco, I suppose, but mostly there’s no connection to the post (most of mine have been for a zipcode lookup program, though lately they’ve switched to herbal fake-viagra and German companies that do who knows what).
Your case sounds rather less clear-cut than the zipcode lookup spammers, I got a commercial comment about dehydrated flakes that I’ve left in place, too surreal not to.
Anyhow, MT collects IP addresses, and allows you to block IP addresses:
Blog Config -> IP Banning
Sorry, that should have read dehydrated onion flakes, though it’d be interesting to hear what you thought I meant…
“‘juicers’ is vaguely related to Costco, I suppose, but mostly there’s no connection to the post…
Actually, in the main post, I mentioned that I bought a juicer–I noted that in the text. Still, the page refernced by the spammer was not the front page of a business, rather a page specifically about juicers. If this was indeed spam, then it is a fairly sophisticated system–linking specific products to pages where the product in general is mentioned.
The more disturbing thing here is that the comment is easy to accept as genuine, as it refers specifically to the post.
Tricky of the spammer, too–the post will not only lead hapless surfers to the sales page, but it will also count as a link pointing to their site, thus elevating it when people search for such items on Google and other search engines.
Just like the spam virus, the despicable spammers are finding more new ways to hijack your own resources to do their dirty work for them. It’s like going to the sidewalk in front of my house and plastering ads on my driveway. You ask me, they should start handing out huge fines for this garbage.