Automated comment spam

Its amazing the lengths some people go to in order to get people to visit a site, how many of you readers have received a email like this in the past..

Hello xxxxxxxxx,

How would you like to have your a'd on 2 Million Websites ?

I'm not pulling your leg!

Discover the new way of advertising on the Internet!

This Tool is one of the hottest - if not the hottest,

marketing tools available!

Discover the power of the Blog Blaster!

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-neve'r seen before!-

This email is for a little bit of scumware called “blogblaster”, it is mainly purchased by unscrupulous site owners, or idiots.

What does it do? Well it basically sends out lots, and lots of automated comments to blogs, spamming as the ad says “up to 2 million” blogs with a comment that has a link back to the spammers site.

Software like this is a pain, as it makes it too easy for idiots to go around spamming blogs, to much spam in someone’s comments can really detract from the readability, and could even result in the blog owner disabling comments, or enabling comment moderation.

Lets say you start getting these comments on your blog, what can you do about it?

Firstly you could do a search on the net to see if that same comment has been posted on lots of other blogs, if it has you can tell by the sheer number of postings if it is from a automated package, or a genuine visitor.

If you find genuinely automated comments on your blog, what should you do?

You could put the nofollow attribute on your comments, so they dont get any benefit in the search engines from the link, or you could delete the comments, perhaps you could be sneaky and even re-write the comment so instead of something like

“You have a really interesting blog about cats, please drop by my site about <link to spammy cat site> and take a look, we sell many cheap cat accessories”

It could be altered to something like

I am a spammer, I use automated blog submission software to spam blogs, a quick search on many search engines will reveal that this comment has been letf on thousands of blogs. I didnt really read your blog, I just dont not that ethical, so please bear in mind my lack of ethics, and my utter lack of respect for your site when you visit the <link to spammy cat site>, and if I was a real reader of the blog, I would come back and question why this comment now says what it does, but Im just a sad person using automated software to fill up the blogospere with my rubbish.

Whatever you do, dont just let the comments sit there, unless you want your comment section to quickly fill up with junk! If you already have a plan for dealing with comment spam, then well done, keep up the good work.

I wonder what would happen if someone set up a test blog and clearly stated that comments could not be left unless you paid a amount of cash for the privelidge, and that leaving a comment without paying up front would result in the commenter being invoiced say five thousand dollars.

A real human would see that message, and not leave a comment, but the automated software would just go ahead and leave the comment. Would it be legally enforcable? Could you actually send the invoice, and sue if the spammer did not pay up? Imagine, if that was the case, and lots of people did this, it would put the spammers out of business real fast…