With apologies to anyone named John. Spammers are getting more clever at spreading their links. Now legitimate website owners are using software tools that allow them to enter keywords of their choice to a create a list of related blogs with comment forms. Many of these applications list blogs that pass Google Rank to the websites of visitors. That’s why I stopped doing the “dofollow” thing several months ago. Since then the number of spam comments has gone down slightly. Cookie for Comments stops the spam bots dead but the human spammer scum still get through.
Next time Akismet marks a legitimate looking comment as spam (or you get a comment from someone who was supposedly christened Austin Texas Photographer by his parents), check your logs. Look up the IP address of the visitor. You may find something like this. Note the lack of a referrer, an old Firefox user agent and then “bsalsa.com” is in the UA of the next request for a post. Bsalsa make a Windows toolkit that this software obviously uses. They’re fans of Borland Delphi apparently!
"GET /2006/11/04/cork-cinema-listings/ HTTP/1.0" 200 43366 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.12"
"GET /feed/ HTTP/1.0" 302 84 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11"
"GET /2006/11/04/cork-cinema-listings/ HTTP/1.1" 200 12089 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11); .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"
When my blogs were dofollowing, I’d get loads of spam comments every day. The tools used fire off a request to the blog to examine the links on that page. They highlight dofollow links so the user knows their spam comment will generate Google Juice for their site.
I was getting so sick and tired of them I contacted several spammers. Lindsay who commented on inphotos.org replied:
Hi Lindsay,
As a photographer, I’m always looking for other blogs to comment on but it’s hard to find interesting photoblogs that post anything other than photos. How did you find my blog? I didn’t see a Google search in my logs. Is it a special program?
Thanks,
Donncha
She was really helpful, even replying twice when I didn’t reply again:
I actually have a program called G-force fast blog finder. Basically, i put in some keywords and it searches ALL blogs with those keywords. THEN it tells me if those blogs do or do not have the “uComment iFollow” addon. Blogs that allow the “follow” tag are good for search engines if i post a comment with a link to my site.. SO basically, i get to look at photography blogs and comment on them while i help my website obtain some more links.
Basically, search engines rank your page based on a few things, one of them is link backs. Basically, a link from a site to my site is like a vote for my site saying it is good. So the more other websites link to my site, the better.. HOWEVER, some blogs and websites have the NOFOLLOW tag in them which does not let the search engines see it. Your site does allow the uComment iFollow.
We also created a link exchange program on our website. if you’re interested, it helps you too also have links for your site on other people’s site. If you go to my site here:
http://__________.com/catalog/links.php
You can submit your link and even a small picture to be displayed.
Let me know if you have any other questionsLindsay
Yea. I Down loaded a program called fast blogger. They have a free trial and basically you add in search term and it searches all blogs for that term. It gives you lists of links to them and tells you if they are no follow or Ufollow IConment blogs. Basically, by findig blogs related to my webstie and blog and posting comments, it helps my website with the search engines when I post a link. It’s a win win situation. You get blog views and comments and the post gets a link back to third site.
If you are interested, I also have a blog. It’s at http://_____________.com/blog
Feel free to comment away and leave a link back to your blog.
We also have a link exchange. Basically you go to Http://____________.com/catalog/links.php
Click submit link and then we will add another link to our website. All we ask is you link back to us in return.
It’s basically everyone helping each other in order to get good page ranking for thief keywords
If you have any questions , Id be happy to answer.
Lindsay
Very helpful wasn’t she? Unfortunately it was the final straw. All links in comments are nofollowed again. Bloody spammers.
The spam comments continue but recently I’ve taken to changing the name of the person to “John”, removing their email and url and then allowing through the comment.
Thanks John!
Donncha,
This is the problem with having any high profile blog, or from being on one of those DoFollow lists, like this fecker
I guess you could have a plugin where beside the
Unapprove | Spam | Delete | Edit | Quick Edit | Reply optopns you could have a further option to “john” the comment, where it would update the username and email address automatically for you.
Paul
Did my last comment, #662273 get listed as SPAM ? 🙁
Paul – it got caught by Akismet, I presume because of that link. Sorry!
Alex King does have a “delink” plugin but it doesn’t work in WP 2.7, must be the changed actions.
I should try and fix that 🙂
I’m on several dofollow lists unfortunately 🙁
we allow dofollow comments on our blog. we also request that people use their name… so lots of things sit in the moderation queue forever…
There was a plugin called delink author or something like that — worked great — but stopped working in wp 2.7
would love for that to work. it just removes the link from the user.
Hello, my name is John McJohn. I love your blog very much. It reminds me of the green fields of Eire that my great grand father came from. You might know it, he grew up in a place called “Inner City Dublin”.
I too have a great website, for my business that I run. I sell toilets, it is called “McJohn’s Johns”. I think both of our excellent websites would benefit from a link exchange. My URL is:
http://www.john.com
Oh I’m sorry, I forgot the funny http thing at the start of that one, let me write it again:
http://www.john.com
Once again, that URL is:
http://www.john.com
Thanks for reading my comment, and as they say in your land of the green… An bhfuil cad agum dul go dti on leithreas.
Haha, going a bit overboard Gamma? 🙂
Plenty of John’s left comments this morning. Surprisingly common name!
It’s great stuff thanks for it
Oh John, John. Glad you enjoyed my post 😛
haha.. nice idea.
I get spammers once in a while, posting irrelevantly to the post. The name “John” appeals but what about more catchy one? like “I love spamming!”
I had lot of spammers before but after using Defension plugin its almost null. Also it provides spam and legit comment feeds which is a great feature compared to Akismet.
And yes I also deny the spammers in .htaccess.
Hello Donncha 😉 I’m using your comment-referrers plugin for spam fighting, a bit tuned it. Here it is: http://jishi.ru/pub/comment-referrers-ns.phps . Remove the final ‘s’ and install.
I have turned off captcha on all my WPs two weeks ago. No spam on pages. No time for moderation. No disclaimers 😉
Haha
Yeah my blog used to be “semi” dofollow with the Top Commentator plug-in. Lots of spam but thankfully my anti spam plug-in was good enough to hold them off.
Yesterday I block them using the htaccess like enli. I think it’s better to block them completely to ease the burden on your server (PHP Calls, database inserts, etc)
I will be using your cookies for comments on my new WP blog. My website blog used to be do-follow and I required a real name or their handle, but no anchor text. Slowly I let a few friends get away with things like “name @ city real estate”. People noticed that and it just snow balled out of control. You just can’t be a nice guy I guess. So they will all be no-follow from now on.
I suppose you might call me a spammer. I did come here with the intention of getting a link back to my website from your highly respected Blog 🙂
I wanted to call myself “merseyside hotels” cos that is the keyword phrase I’m trying to promote. But I guess you wouldn’t believe that was my name would you 🙂
I don’t call myself a spammer cos I would never just dump a pointless link, I’d only post something that fitted in.
Why I’m rambling on here is that I wanted to tell you your Blog is showing up on one of the top SEO marketing tools (market Samurai) as being a “follow” blog. So that would be one reason why you are attracting a lot of junk. And is the reason I found you.
I don’t know why they have you down as “follow” cos I can see your links are “nofolllow” Very odd.
Cheers
Mike
Mike – I use to dofollow links but haven’t done in quite a while. The number of spammers went way down but yes, there’s still a trickle of them.