This is a guest post by Febap Liew from Blogxic.com and in this post he is writing about various types of spam comments bloggers usually notice and how you can perfectly recognize them and delete it.
I used to work alongside with affiliate marketing to make money online. Only recently, I have started a Blog to venture more in-depthly on the opportunity of making money online. However, as a new blog master myself, I have come across various situations that what seems at times puzzling to me. One of them of what I will be writing on today is about spam comments of which I have to ‘heavily’ judge and moderate.
Yes I have heard countless times of how people tend to relate their experience with spams and fake comments on their blog. I used to think just how hard it really could be. After all it is spam and we should be able to recognize them one way or another. How wrong I could have possibly been.
Therefore, as a new blog master myself I am ‘honored’ to be able to have come across such misdeeds. Therefore as I have scoured on ways to educate myself to prevent such deeds from happening in my blog, herein, I would like to educate mostly to the rest of the new budding bloggers as well as some old time bloggers themselves too on how you can come about to recognizing spam amongst your blog comments.
The Truth About These Silent Perpetrators
Like it or not, spam comments can take in many forms. It may even look like anything from a sincere compliment to a request for information.
For example (taken directly from my blog) :
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I really am impressed with this post. You talk about some great information. I’ll definitely be back when your site is updated…Thank You
Richjanitor
Thanks for the well-thought article. I’m actually at work right now! So I need to go off without reading all I’d like. However, I put your blog on my msn feed so that I can read more.
Spammers utilize the art of ‘mystic’ confusion to blind the eyes of many blog moderators. They crawl into the site looking like they mean no harm. Whether or not you are able to detect such offenses, read on to find out more.
Real People In Action
Some of the most hardly detectable spams are the ones that are profoundly personalized and self written by real human beings. Yes, people do these sorts of ‘jobs’ for a living. These spammers are usually paid by spam companies to write spams. Period. They usually visit your blog, read through some of your posts and chip in comments. They tweak and turn to make sure that it blends well with your blog. Cunning. Often times, they may even address you by your name to prevent their comments from being labeled as ‘spam’.
claim insurance
Someone I work with visits your blog frequently and recommended it to me to read too. The writing style is great and the content is top-notch. Thanks for the insight you provide the readers!
Generic Questions
Okay, I find this is by far the most time wasting message spam ever. These comments are usually the ones that request you to provide certain information about your blog. By thinking that they actually did went through your blog and took the liberty to know more about it, such comments are nothing more than general questions that could apply to any other blog.
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Hi. this is kind of an “unconventional” question , but have other visitors asked you how to get the menu bar to look like you’ve got it? I also have a blog and am really looking to alter around the theme, however am scared to death to mess with it for fear of the search engines punishing me. I am very new to all of this …so i am just not positive exactly how to try to to it all yet. I’ll just keep working on it one day at a time.marketing secrets
I love your website! did you create this yourself or did you outsource it? Im looking for a blog design thats similar so thats the only reason I’m asking. Either way keep up the nice work I was impressed with your content really..
Flattering
Now who doesn’t like getting flattered? I know I do but as I sat down and went through such comments, I find it to be humiliating likewise to even receive such a comment. I believe if your blog is as top notch as what they intended to voice out upon, it would be more than just ‘pure’ flattering.
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My wife and I believe you could have a fairly good blog here… today was my initial time coming here..i just happened to appear across it performing a google research. anyway, outstanding post..i’ll be bookmarking this site for sure.
Bring Your Forks Out & Light That Torch
Spam attracts spam. The more you are being totally clueless, the more will such jesters come flocking into your blog. Therefore, always keep yourself prepared and wits up. These clowns are always on a lookout to prey on naive blog masters and will do what it takes to disguise themselves.
Don’t just leave spam as how it is. Don’t even think of approving any one of them and leave your genuine readers and commentators to seek them out. Diligent yourself and maintain your blog’s integrity. If you don’t they will eventually flock into your blog like wild geese on loose. You don’t want that happening now, don’t you.
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I love your website! did you create this yourself or did you outsource it? Im looking for a blog design thats similar so thats the only reason I’m asking. Either way keep up the nice work I was impressed with your content really..Advertising Business Marketing
hands down, this is a good post i actually took some advice from this, thanks buddy. i just saved this blog for any future posts( yes they even have a smiley face inserted )
What To Look Out For =>
Author name : I personally find that looking at the authors name would eventually reveal to you the truth from its hiding. If by any chance it sounds like a product or service name, 99% that it is definitely a spam comment.
Author URL : If by any chance the name sounds normal. Go forth by looking at the author’s url. If it is by any chance again irrelevant to your blog content or niches, it most probably is considered spam too. You can go on further by clicking on the link and see where it would direct you to. Some of the links that I have received are incomefromhomebusiness.org, claiminsurance.org, webstudyabroad.com, TheYouTubeSecretExposed.com and many more.
Content : Keep an eye to some of the few tips and advices that are listed above. They can ultimately be the perfect guide for you to recognize such treats to your blog comments.
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Article Written By Febap Liew
Febap Liew is an enthusiastic budding internet marketer and the developer of BlogXic : Make Money Online Today. She has the utmost passion to learn on various ways of making money online. Follow her on her blog for everything there is to know on how to Make Money Online Today. Read Up on Detailed Complete Product Review | 24 Hour Internet Business of what she opted in for to make her first fortune online.
Febap Liew has written 3 superb article(s) on this blog
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{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
This is post is right on time. I have been receiving comments exactly as you describe in your post. Some have been very flattering, convincing and downright too good to be true, but when I check the name and the url it is a dead giveaway that they are spam comments. Thank goodness for spam blocker.
Your article helped be so much!
Take care!
-Evelyn
Hey Evelyn,
thank you for your comments.
i am glad that my post came in handy
i am using akismet now .. and well , i’ll say it did a fine job in keeping those spams away
cheers
have a blast~
Febap Liew, I have to give it you mate, what a clever mind and sharp eye you have!
You really identified the spam comments. We can see that they try to be smart, but they cannot be smarter than the blogger!
It’s sometimes hard to differentiate between legitimate comments and spam comments, so thanks a lot for identifying and separating these two. I have not seen an article like this before, which meant into such detail, with the actual screen shots!
Kindest,
Nabeel
Hey Nabeel,
lol, thank you for commenting.
i bet many of the blog masters out there will eventually go about encountering such. I did and I can’t help but to really ‘pen’ it down. ;P
exactly, they thought they could outsmart the bloggers but who are they to ‘kid’ around with ?
there are inevitably many tools and softwares to go about taking their misdeeds DOWN! =D haha
i am glad that you have enjoyed reading.
cheers,buddy.
I agree with you on this Nabeel. Even some spam comments that are not look like a spam, you still detected those. This is also the first time I’ve seen a post like this, discussing about spam comments, and you really covered some good examples out there.
Keep it up!
Gary
There are a couple of good spam examples there. I would have a hard time detecting some of those. I don’t understand why people can’t take the time to read the post and make a relevant comment. I subscribe to a variety of Blogs that I like and enjoy reading. Then I make my comments and I get a little link love in return. It makes no sense why people cannot just respect the system. It will never change and I fear that eventually Google will do something drastic and it will really impede the Real SEO’s out there that are following the rules and trying to think about long term.
hey Mike,
i suppose some are just trying to take the ‘easy’ way out of doing it. leaving proper comments take effort and time as compared to submitting mass generic comments with a click of a ‘submit’ button.
we’ll just have to wait and see what Google ought to do about it. hopefully it won’t be a dire drastic alteration… who knows what they ought to do to comprehend such ‘culprit’.
cheers
have a nice day
Okay, so we all get comment spam. Personally I find that Akismet deals with the worst of it and I manually approve anything that gets through. I always delete generic comments that are off-topic, and certainly any where the authors link is to a bad neighborhood. Other than that I’m pretty easy going. Provided that your comment is on-topic and well written I’ll approve it. I also tend to run Keywordluv, so I don’t end up with spammy looking author names – at least anchor text gets prefixed with the name of a real person!.
hey michelle,
thank you for commenting. well yea, akismet has subsequently ease my grueling process of dealing with spams. Inevitable, i somehow tend to ignore what akisment labels as spam and only approve what went through. However, i am afraid that sometimes ,askisment might have labeled a genuine comment wrongly, i have heard that there are cases as such. oh well, just gotta keep improving and supplementing other various tools to deal with such spammers. =P
have a nice day, michelle
Excellent overview of the spam types. I’ve noticed that many have been using questions that are often irrelevant to the blog or what they’ll try doing is say they found the blog through X and “has become a subscriber”.
The best indicator, of course, is the URL. Sometimes people can be tricky though – the comment may be quite genuine but then again if you click over to their site it could just be a scraper.
hey murlu,
yea exactly. They would even go to the extend of claiming that their mentor , wife, grandchild recommended your blog to them .. etc. =\
ah well, spammers are such a pest to the blogosphere. haha
have a nice day
Excellent read. Even I face such spam comments, sometimes spammers are so expert that we have to think twice before approving any comment. Agree with you that we must check the URL of the comment, it gives you the idea that comment is a spam or not.
hey Whiztechy ,
thank you for your comments.
yea, spammers have definitely ‘improve’ . =\ i guess its rather a game of survival for them. =P
cheers
Nice Febap. I get kinda pissed off when I get the ‘mystic’ comments you’ve provided as examples. In our niche, real estate, there are a lot of spammers. We get comments all the time saying the same thing, “Nice article, we’ll be back later.” The cool thing about Akismet is sooner or later the spammer will not have to be dealt with as someone will flag the comment and the spammer is placed in Akismet purgatory to never been seen again.
Hey Colleen,
yeah,before I actually had akismet activated, i was rather frustrated with the number of spammers that is literally flooding my blog comments. even thou I always had in on moderation, i still find it agonizing to be constantly hitting the ‘delete’ button.
you are right. thank you for people/developers/software programmers that allows us to work at ease and deal with these spammers. =)
cheers
I face same problem here, and it was makes me tired because i have to delete it one by one. Yes, the simple way to detect is author name. If the author name is “Keyword”, then it’s spam. I don’t know why spammer willing to waste their time to build backlink. Actually, their can get quality backlink easily by finding a blog with KeywordLuv installed just like this blog. So, please spammer…no need to spam…
@Akira07
it can get so frustrating,right. =)
however Akira, my piece of advice, we shouldn’t just conclude one’s intention base on the author name. I have come across legitimate comments with keyword author names inserted into it. You don’t want to be deleting the wrong comment now, don’t we.
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Hope you have enjoyed reading. cheers
Have a nice day.
Re-check is the best, i’m agree about it. To tell you, my comments in this blog sometime jumped into spam list. But Typhoon do re-check it, so my post is safe.
I can spot them a mile away. The thing is, even legitimate comments with nothing but a keyword in the name field gets deleted on my blog. I require a name first, then keywords if they want to describe their site. But it is flat out disrespectful to just insert keywords and call it a comment.
@ Brandon
Having went through 2 comments that have a similar distinctive action on ‘spam control’, i suppose as blog masters, we have our rights to maintain a constant system of control over our blogs.
@ Akira
It’s sort of a skill that will improve over time… and it’s an awesome one to have, just like you Brandon, as you can tell immediately a spam comment from the not.
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We learn as we progress ..
cheers,my friend.
have a nice day.
This is a touchy subject for me. To be frank, i probably would not post here if it were not for the dofollow/keywordluv plugins installed. I really do enjoy reading the posts at SB but the point is, i have it added to my rss feed because there are quality posts as well as the opportunity to get some backlinks.
So in this case, what is really considered SPAM?
@Josiah
I suppose spams are lazy ways for lazy peoples to obtain backlinks.
I suppose posting on a nofollow comment blogs isn’t such a bad idea after all.. one thing i know is that you get to expose yourself and build up your credibility regards of any beneficial advatanges like keywordluv.
getting backlinks are crucial but at times,building credibility and exposing your ‘identity’ in the blogosphere will distinctively benefit you in the long run to come too. =)
cheers
have a nice day
Haha,
Great post! I am at work but don’t have time to read it right now so I’ll bookmark the page!
…. just kidding
Honestly great post though, really unique. I actually got a laugh reading some of the attempts people make to disguise spam. A lot of it is actually just pretty pathetic. lol
CJ
CJ’s last blog ..25 Hot Article Sites – List of Top Article Directories To Increase Your Site’s PageRank!
Yes, very pathetic that their do anything for link, even their know that the spam comment will be deleted. So, what their do is actually waste a time.
I don’t know what spammer method is appear 1-2 years later, it will be more crazy
But still…useless….
@CJ
and i thought you meant it .. *Spam* LOL
…just kidding…
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I am glad that it made you laugh.. yeah it did for me too at the point of moment where I went through those spams.
I went..what the he**
i am glad that you have enjoyed reading,buddy.
cheers
Good points Febap. I normally automatically remove comments that have keywords (at all) in the authors name. There are plugins for that, which some spammers use as well. The trick is to notice if what they are saying is actually -related- to your post, or if it is just a generic comment that could be made about any post.
I’ve come to the habit of deleting comments that just say “thanks… blah blah blah” as well because most are just junk, and I want readers to add to the discussion and not just try to get a link back.
P.S. – Email addresses are giveaways as well. I tend to lean toward commenters that use their name in their email address, or the email address is @ the domain of their URL. Just my 2 cents.
@Aaron
yea maintaining a positive habit of having commentator add more than just saying “thank you” , or “great post” is very crucial.
Come to think about it, i would never have to be bothered about reading any of the blog post and all i have to do to obtain quality backlinks are just by saying “thank you. Such a wonderful post. keep it up”.
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keep up the good work at there,aye. =)
cheers
You’re so right that spam attracts spam. That’s why people should stop approving it, even if it makes their blog “look” better to have more comments. It’s silly.
@Tia,
hey tia. glad to see you here.
you are absolutely right. You can’t really fake. if it’s spam it will always be spam no matter how ‘pleasing’ they may sound .
have a nice day
You’re point it…! That’s true, some bloggers accepting spam post just to increase their blog statistic. But what their do is actually attract more spam.
Febap, these kinds of commenters i believe, will always exist as long as blogging exists. It’s just a matter of your perspective if you think these kind of commenters mean any harm or not
If you think they do, just trash them!
I haven’t had a blog that never attracted these kinds of spammers. Visibility simply attracts spam
@John,
we ought to believe in that there will always be a sought of ‘balance’ in the way things work. Where you good, there will be evil. same as you mentioned, where there are blogs, spam will ought to follow. indeed, it relies on one’s perspective on what is best done with it. =)
visibility attracts spams and spams may simply mean that your blog is of value .:)
cheers
Let’s be honest, all of us comment on some posts (which are do follow/keywordluv enabled) one way or the other because of the backlinks we get. For me, this is just a sort of beneficial tie for both the blog writer who gets exposure for his/her posts and the blog commenter who wants backlinks, and I think this is probably the main reason why there are do follow sites. I have seen some article posts which have comments that are obviously spam because they are entirely not related to the topic and some are downright ridiculous (I was looking at a wordpress tutorial one time and it has a very long 3-paragraph comment talking about dogs and dog training). Whatever the comment is, It is still up to the blog owner to judge them whether they pass or end up as trash.
Hi – yup, spam comments are a pain in the neck, though I find there’s a number of automatic tools that can help.
If you’re using WordPress, then a “must have” plug-in is Akismet, in fact it’s become so “must have” that from WordPress v2.9.2 it has shipped as part of the core install package (it’s written by Auttomatic and WordPress after all) and of course it’s mandatory on WordPress’s free service at wordpress.com.
But, as good as Akismet is at catching spam comments, it only diverts them to a holding place and doesn’t clear them out automatically until after the pre-set number of days you set for it to do so – this can be good, if you’re bored or have nothing else to do, you can go look through them and test it’s not catching false positives.
If you want to block 90% plus of spam before it even gets submitted, then you need to install some sort of captcha or human visible test system – on all my blogs, this keeps auto-spam (placed by robots) down to nil, leaving Akismet and me to only deal with the human written spam.
Don’t forget too, to set the inbuilt WordPress spam recognition settings – like the maximum number of links in a comment, key spam words (as well as abusive and profane words) that will cause a comment to be flagged as spam and not published.
Lastly, here’s a top tip from me – based on a broad portfolio of blogs hosted across multiple hosting companies – I have no idea why this happens, but, blogs hosted on US hosting companies get hit with many, many times more spam comments than those hosted on UK hosting services. – I have absolutely no idea why this happens, but over 3 years of data watching has shown it to be a consistent fact.
Be a smart blogger – use the tools available to do 95% of the site policing for you, but don’t rely on them to do 100% of it.
@Ed,
heya Ed, thank you for you wonderful insight.you are absolutely right. Akisment catches Spam but it doesn’t relatively save you much of the trouble of needing you to ‘delete’ them. as you say, they don’t exactly clear them off automatically. However, this is essentially too a very needed tool because it identifies them.
You are right about using Captcha and and those sort of plugins that are usually intergrated with Akismet. That way, you can be sure that it’s humanely written and not by some spam robots.
Why are the US targeted. My catch is that maybe because the largest online consumers are located at US. that is what majority of my customers are coming from and maybe those spammers are trying to target this point. =)
cheers
Great post, Febap. You point out very well, the fact that spam comments aren’t always very obvious. Human generated spam is often cleverly crafted, and at first glance, seems to be a sincere comment. I have gotten into the habit of checking the URL on all comments, before approving them. Just this morning, I had to delete thirteen out of Akismet’s holding tank, and more than half of them were the sort of comment that I probably would have approved, had I not checked deeper.
Akismet isn’t perfect, but it does a pretty darn good job, as far as I’m concerned.
Keep ‘em coming, Febap.
Hey Doc,
you are absolutely right on that. Akisment isn’t perfect but it provides us with the fundamental needs of tackling such perpetrators.
=)
thank you for your comments… and I am glad that you have enjoyed reading.
cheers
I normally sometimes welcome fake commments and spam to re-edit the comments in my favor. I collect all incoming email addresses but I delete all URLs. This at times help prevent them from earning backlinks. This is one way of punishing them for just using you while not being considerate or sincere.
I do the same thing. I’ll edit their contents to be more thought-provoking and grammatically correct. Then I remove the URL. For the big time spammers, this doesn’t hurt their feelings. They’ll probably never manually come across my blog again.
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