101 Articles Comment Spam
COMMENT SPAM
The whole point of comments in blogs, news sites and products sites is to get users interactive with the websites they are commenting on. Comments help build up communities. If you comment on someone's website they know you better, they know you are visiting their website and taking time to comment about something they sell or write. Commenting on other blogs will make the site owner notice you and if you have a link back from your comments, they can visit your website and if they link it they can comment on your blog or link to your blog from their blog. There are lots of constructive points about comments but today comments are one of the most vulnerable areas for spammers to take advantage. Webmasters and site owners are forced to implement multiple protections like captchas, premoderated comments, nofollow of comments etc. So why do we do that?
No one really wanted to do it. But Search Engine spammers started taking advantage of these vulnerable comment areas in blogs and they used it as a good location to insert their spam links filled with comments. They just want to dump their links in comments to gain link juice or PageRank from the blog they are commenting. This forces webmasters or site owners or blogging software providers to protect their sites / application from hackings being exploited. Almost all the blog software providers have in built protection for preventing spam comments. Wordpress, blogger, joomla, drupal all have nofollow on their comments. Many news sites pre-moderate comments and only valid comments are made to go live. Also to prevent automated comments, Captchas are used. Captchas are image identification used to prevent crawlers from submitting a form automatically. A user is asked to type the letters in an image to submit the form.
Comment spam is still a wide spread strategy but due to strong protections by Search engines and blog software providers, it has not reached disaster levels. Still I consider comment spamming as one of the major search engine manipulation. Imagine someone comments on your blog and it is full of junk links to some spammer website. It will help the spammer website but will make the linking website loose reputation if they don't have protection.
"Awesome blog, do you have twitter or Facebook? I will bookmark this page thanks."
"Good blog post, nice efforts. It couldn't appear to have been penned any better. Reading this article piece of writing reminds me about my old boss! He usually kept babbling about this. I will email this post to him. Pretty confident he will probably have a high-quality read. Appreciate your posting!
My blog is…….."
"It was excited to come across your site a short while ago. I arrived here today hoping to learn interesting things. I was not upset. Your wells thought out ideas with new strategies on this subject matter were enlightening and a great help to me. Thank you for making time to create these things and for sharing your mind."
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Screen Shots |
The image below is the official blog page of Google, where it tells what exactly is comment spam and also says about attribute "no follow" on hyperlinks.
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Surveys |
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Graph and Statistics on Comment spam |
The image reveals the top comment spammer countries, with United States on the top followed by China and Russia.
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Working Example-Case Study |
(http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/3191/revealed-the-grubby-world-of-comment-spam/)
Working Example of Comment spam:
Click on the image to enlarge!
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |