New Type of Scraped Comment Blog Spam

The spammers took their games up another notch today with a new type of blog spam that scrapes one of the blogger’s own comments and/or someone else’s real comment and reposts it as a “new” comment in the same post. This makes the comments seem relevant to the post and might result in their slipping them more successfully into blogs.

Wouldn’t you think someone sharp enough to do such a thing could find a more productive way to spend their time?

The good news is Akismet DID flag these as spam. Perhaps they’ve already adapted to defeat this challenge. I am sharing this here because it is likely that a blogger may “rescue” a comment of this type because it IS highly relevant to the post in which it appears.

Here are two examples of this new strategy that appeared today in two of the more popular blog posts here:

In our popular DoFollow Lists of Blogs, Social Networking Sites and Forums; DoFollow Search Tool; Understanding Do Follow, No Follow that mentions PageRush and has a comment from the developer of that program we deleted this:

My long term vision for PageRush is to maintain a list of keywords that you are interested in. By searching for all of the keyword phrases Page Rush will identify niche blogs you should be commenting on (do follow or otherwise). If you have any posts related to any you see here do please share the links. I periodically move them up into the body of posts or decide a new post featuring new information is more applicable.I use seo quake to find out if sites are do-follow. If they are no-follow a line is placed through the link. I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me.

The part in italics was scraped from a comment made by Adam from PageRush. The part in bold was scraped from one of my replies further down the page. The last few sentences are original to the spammer. Here is another example, this time from REVIEW: Mastering Google Analytics – Easy to Understand FREE eCourse :

We can increase our income if we learn more about first analytics and then split testing. Even if we don’t hone those kinds of advanced skills there are simple things to learn like seeing where your visitors go on your site and using the overlay feature originated by Click Tracks. I still hope to be blogging by then and perhaps the extra time on my hand can be consumed by analyzing those boring stats. Of course, if I become a blogging millionaire I will be too busy touring the world finding interesting tales to blog about. I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me.

In this example the bold was scraped from one of my comment replies, the italics is from a comment made by Sire of the WassupBlog For Blogging Tips who regularly comments here and the last few sentences are the same as in the other example. [NOTE: Sire's blog is one to subscribe to, read and comment in as he is very active across the blogosphere.]

DEALING WITH BLOG SPAM:

A combination of Akismet and Math, Akismet and Captcha, or Akismet and NoSpamNX are the best solutions I’ve come across so far. I just found NoSpamNX and may test it in the near future.

Wouldn’t it be great if spammers would take up honest work?

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Tagged as: blog spam