Bubble Meter has been getting a lot of comment link spam coming from China recently, promoting World of Warcraft gold (whatever that is). This comment link spam appears on over 150,000 Blogger blog posts, and yet the folks at Google (the owner of Blogger) seem to be oblivious.Since being given administrator rights by David recently, I have been diligently deleting comment link spam, even on very old blog posts. I subscribe to Bubble Meter's comments in Google Reader, so I see the link spam and delete it within a few hours of it being posted. I can also find and delete older comment link spam by Googling for site:bubblemeter.blogspot.com "wow gold".
Deleting the link spam is kind of fun, but as I've been deleting it, the spammers have been more determined to post it. I've been trying to think of a way to defend against the spam without interrupting the ability of legitimate readers to carry on a conversation on the blog. I considered turning on comment moderation, but that would make it difficult for commenters to carry on a flowing conversation (or argument). I considered requiring commenters to have user accounts, but that would discourage casual readers from commenting. The spammers have Blogger accounts anyway, so that wouldn't work. (Unfortunately, Blogger allows people to flag blogs as hosting link spam, but it doesn't allow people to flag actual blogger user accounts as being spammers, so I have no way of bringing the spammers to Google's attention.)
It occurred to me that almost all legitimate comments appear on new blog posts, not old ones. Comments slow to a trickle on blog posts that are more than a day or two old. Meanwhile, link spammers don't really care how new or old a blog post is. Therefore, I have decided to turn on comment moderation only for blog posts that are older than three days old. This should allow legitimate readers to carry on a free-flowing conversation, while seriously impinging on the ability of spammers to abuse Bubble Meter.
Since the spammers live halfway around the world, they post the link spam when you and I are sleeping (usually around 1:00-2:00 am ET). So, another option I've considered to deter them is to turn off comments at night, and turn them back on in the morning.
Posts
Dayum, now we're outsourcing our white collar spam jobs too?
ReplyDeleteWhen will this global wage arbitrage end? When we all live off of a bowl of rice a day?
Chuck
What is stupid is that the spammers are getting no benefit from the spam because Blogger automatically adds rel="nofollow" to links in comments. nofollow causes search engines to not count the link towards the search ranking. Since you have the captcha turned on that means that someone is paying an army of chinamen to manually enter comments, for no gain, amazing. That is unless your template has disabled nofollow, hmmm, let me create a link to see if your links have nofollow enabled.
ReplyDeleteHey Miguel,
ReplyDeleteYour comment reflects what I wrote, and then removed, as the last paragraph of the post. At the time I wrote it I couldn't confirm that nofollow was actually being used, even though I thought it was. (I checked your link, and yes, it is being used.) I also wondered whether the spammers actually expected people to click on the links. But yes, it does seem like people are getting paid for work that has no gain for them.
"nofollow causes search engines to not count the link towards the search ranking. Since you have the captcha turned on that means that someone is paying an army of chinamen to manually enter comments, for no gain, amazing."
ReplyDeleteThe "nofollow" is used only on google. Other search engines ignore it. And there are software out there that can read captcha, so you dont need a human to spam.
But yeah spammers suck.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThe "nofollow" is used only on google. Other search engines ignore it.
Good point. I think many Chinese use baidu.com.
I want to say the changed rule will promote their (Spam）tools.
ReplyDelete