I recently received the most creative and targeted comment spam I’ve ever seen. As creative and targeted as it was, however, it still wouldn’t have been all that “effective” had it made it pass my spam filtre.
You see, something that’s always baffled me about spammers is everything they don’t know about spamming a blog. The top 3 things they don’t seem to realize are:
- Spam should look like an actual comment: having an actual username (UN) and “comment,” as opposed to just some garbled text and a slew of links.
- There is rarely any SEO gain to a blog comment: most blog comment links feature have the nofollow attribute attached to them.
- Spam bots require configuration: blog spam bots can be baught for as low as $40, but you have to give them a UN, URL, and comment content so that the “comment” becomes a call-to-action (CTA) that might divert other readers to your site.
But this “Gordon Hamilton” character, he (1) used a plausible UN, (2) left a plausible comment, and (3) even used a bot that scraped my own UN and targeted the comment at me personally.
Where “Gordie” dropped the ball, however, is on the CTA-side of things: his UN and “comment” don’t link anywhere.
Now, the IP whois tells me that Gordie is a fellow Canadian working from a home internet connection, so maybe he’s just a ne’er-do-well cad who’s trying to slander my “good name.” But if that’s the case, what Gordie failed to anticipate is that I have an insatiable appetite for attention, and I’ll pretty much use whatever excuse there is to get whatever publicity I can get.
