Web Cash

Every couple of days, I quickly browse through the Akismet spam bin to see if any real comments got sucked in. There usually aren’t any.

However, I’ve been struck recently by seemingly pointless spam comments. They are clearly generated by a bot, but they don’t include any kind of backlink… what’s the purpose of that?

Pointless Spam Comment from Swiss Dude

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments lately that follow a simple pattern. They are clearly generated by some sort of script that searches for a random phrase, picks a result, and then automatically submits a comment based on the title information in the page.

Here’s a sample comment.

Hey! I came across your blog posting after searching for and your post on Badge | Web Cash makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will research more next Friday when I have the day off.

It seems that a phrase should be inserted in between “searching for” and “and your post.” Another dead give away that this is a bot is that it mentions my post on “Badge | Web Cash.”

It’s clearly copied right out of the title tag for the pages. These include the blog name (Web Cash) at the end, where-as the on-page titles don’t. And no human in his right mind would reference a post title like that.

Here’s another example comment, which seems to have gone through the bot script better.

Hello webmaster I found your blog on Google while searching for background check and your post regarding Modify a Wordpress RSS Feed Widget with Rel=Nofollow | Web Cash looks very interesting for me. Ive bookmarked the post in my digg account.

Again, the title appears verbatim from the <title> element. The name that is used also appears to line up with the search phrase used (in this case, background check).

So I guess the script is designed to take a phrase you are trying to optimize for, search for that phrase, and spam all the results with a comment.

But Some Comments Have No Link…

Some of these comments have a link filled into the URI section. This is logical. If a bot is going to spider through my site and dump random comments it ought to leave a link back to the original site… or it’s just wasting it’s time.

Yet a lot of these comments (all seemingly coming from “Swiss Dude”) have no link attached to them. I guess maybe the guy botched some of the settings and screwed up the script.

Ah well. All I can say is - thank goodness for Akismet. If I had to wade through all these comments on a daily (hourly?) basis, I’d probably have commenting turned off. As it stands, Akismet picks up about 95% of the trash that comes in - and the rest is inane enough that I just let it go.

Tags: akismet, blogging, comment, spam