Beware of clever comment spam on your corporate blog

Posted by: Thom James

We recently noticed a couple of incidences of comment spam on one of our clients’ blogs.

Comment spam is usually pretty obvious since it more often than not links you to sites selling products to help you cope with sexual inadequacies, or ‘genuine’ Rolexes and the like.

However this particular spam was far more subtle, hidden in fairly innocuous comments from supposedly encouraging readers.

And they both pointed to credible, if not plain-looking blogs (see below), loaded with Google AdSense ads. Nevertheless, one of them hid links to unsavoury content at the bottom. And there were other clues, such as a lack of detail on how to contact the supposedly expert blogger, or any biographical info about the author.

Not surprisingly, both blog domains were registered to the same person. Whether the spam was being distributed automatically or manually, this was an attempt to direct traffic to these blogs to make money from the Ads. So, Brian Fleming, knock it off…

As spammers get smarter, you need to watch out for these kind of comments, otherwise you may find yourself approving them in the moderation process when in fact they are dishonest attempts to redirect users to their blogs or boost their rankings by adding in-bound links.

So if it’s your job to monitor and moderate your company’s blog, make sure that every link embedded in a comment goes back to a bona fide blog on similar, relevant content. And read those blogs carefully!