A month ago, my friend Effie from SI started asking me about some comments she has been getting on her blogs. She wondered if they were, in fact, spam comments or just ESL comments by folks who wanted to say howdy and thanks but didn’t have much to say. Here’s an example of what to look out for:
I will make a point of adding as many as I come upon. They look almost human but here are a couple ways to discern: they don’t specifically address the content of your post or write anything that adds value to your post or any preceeding comments. Also, check out the link they drop.
Most of the time, folks who comment on your site are a lot like you — if they drop an affilliate site link or a commerce site link into the Author info, then it is not a real human, probably either a new generation of auto content generation robotic script, written to sneak past AKISMET, or it is a very poorly-paid “meat bot” who is being paid close to nothing to churn through piles of blogs, filling out Captcha forms and dropping in these “hand-written” comments.
Let me know if you have any questions and please keep your eyes out. I will drop more in as I find them. Don’t be fooled!
Thanks for getting the word out there about this new (and annoying) type of comment spam. It’s always frustrating when it hits your blog, but knowing how to recognize it is the best line of defense.
What will they think of next? I wouldn’t have thought it worth spammers time and trouble to add affiliate links anyway….. does anyone really click on them anymore? Nice to be made aware of how they work, cheers.
Is there any way to report this? And is it worth the effort if there is an option?
We had a spell last year when we got loads of these, but the funny thing is they were from competitors in the UK, posting very badly written comments on our blog. They were vaguely related to what we were writing about and referenced things like an ‘advertising champagne’! Needless to say they didn’t get the backlink.