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Comment Spam the Wagon? ITSOK with Me
November 28, 2005
Maintaining the SEO Speedwagon is not quite as glamorous a task as, say, Alfred might have with the Batmobile, or Q with his fleet of Aston Martins. In fact, our version of machine guns hiding behind headlamps is a simple button marked "Ban IP Address," which we reserve for commenters and trackersback who attempt to hijack our fair vehicle to carry dirty links across the border.
I'm not the first one to notice a new, two-tiered spamming tactic among blog comment spammers. First, the links these spammers are pointing to are usually large, legitimate brands, such as Apple or Microsoft. Second, they include the rel="itsok" attribute on a link. Of those sites that have noticed this approach, however, not too many have figured out exactly why spammers are using it. Surely, SURELY, they're not dumb enough to think that it's overriding the rel="nofollow" attribute (definition), about which I became all sappy last week.
Turns out they don't believe that at all. A very articulate explanation at Concurring Opinions reveals the motive - which only hardcore spamhunters (or hardcore spammers) would naturally intuit:
These comments are a funny sort of trojan horse. They are designed to be easily and readily flagged as spam; however their links are to popular and legitimate sites. Spammers do this so that popular legitimate sites will be added to the blacklists, corrupting them. If the blacklists are full of mainstream sites, and kill comments that use links to apple.com or yahoo.com, then bloggers will stop using the blacklists. And they will once again be easy prey for the spammers.
Sigh. No wonder I thought spammers were lousy at checkers; turns out they've been playing chess the whole time.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at November 28, 2005 03:32 PM
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