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.