I personally moderate every comment on Twelve Mile Circle. If you make an effort to respond to one of my posts with something thoughtful, rest assured I’ve genuinely read it.
A few months ago I had a growing problem with spammers. Thankfully I found a solution that keeps that junk away from my pages automatically. I almost never see it anymore and spam comments now approach zero on my site. Meanwhile, I see from my files that the solution blocked 276 attempts in just the first twelve days of September!
Spammers Never Give Up
Unfortunately, spammers are a highly resilient bunch. They use other less-common methods too. For example, sometimes they set up phony blogs that reference posts in legitimate blogs. In WordPress, the software behind Twelve Mile Circle and millions of other blogs, a blog posting from another site that happens to reference one of your blog postings can appear as a “comment” on your blog. I still moderate them and soundly reject them when they’re inappropriate of course. Even so, spammers figure that people will be less vigilant if it’s an incoming link from another blog. Anyway, I thought might enjoy geolocating some of the recent fake blogs that have knocked on my door:
Admittedly this is a very small, self-selecting and unscientific sample but it still results in some interesting patterns. First, it’s a worldwide scourge: Europe (France, Latvia), Asia (Pakistan, India, China), North America (United States) and South America (Brazil). Greed is truly an international phenomenon. Second, that segment of U.S.A. population that grumbles about motives and ethics of foreigners should note that about half of the sleazebags in my sample are homegrown.
Backlinks
It’s all about backlinks, the links that come onto a website from external sources. And by extension, advertising revenue. Many ranking algorithms make a presumption related to this. Namely, if a page has lots of external links it must somehow be “better” than one with fewer. Search engines take this into consideration to determine which websites they will display to their readers and in which order.
Coming up higher on a search result means more viewers referred to the website. So following this logic, more viewers means more advertising revenue. Naturally, the ethically challenged try to game the system. They use link farms, or collections of websites, to reference each other. In response, creators of search engines modify their algorithms to catch a lot of this. So it becomes a constant cat-and-mouse game. Now spammers are finding methods to generate backlinks from “legitimate” websites.
With the external blog comment method, typically what I see on fake blog postings is a block of text copied word-for-word from one of my postings with a link to my post. Usually there are 30 or 40 other websites similarly referenced on the same page of the fake blog. Generally there is a unifying theme or key word that ties all of the websites together. However, they jumble the context and nothing quite make sense. Invariably these pages also include the maximum allowable units of Google AdSense or Yahoo! Content Match advertising.
They’re hoping that by referencing lots of blog postings they will generate sufficient backlinks. This will score high on search engines results and thereby get those eyeballs on the advertisements. The fact that search engine results produce bogus, useless suggestions, with viewers getting zero benefit becomes irrelevant to the miscreants who produce fake blogs. It’s all about the money from the ads.
A Common Source?
There’s sufficient similarity to the bogus blogs that leads me to wonder if perhaps there’s a master spammer out there somewhere who’s created a turn-key package to generate these sites, and who is selling the solution to others. It must not be too difficult technologically to auto-generate maybe several tens or hundreds of thousands of these fake blog entries along thematic lines. If each of several-thousand fake posting results in just a single hit each day, it’s possible to see that someone living in Lahore, Pakistan, or Riga, Latvia, or Laurel, Mississippi, might be able to live pretty well. I still think it’s unethical. Even so, I can see how it might be tempting to those with a “get rich quick” mentality.
That doesn’t mean I have to help them, though. I will continue to reject any comment — whether posted directly on the site or coming indirectly as a reference from an external blog posting — unless it truly adds value to my readership. One is judged by the company one keeps. If all the comments on my site were crap then the whole site would be crap. I won’t let that happen.
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