In the past 36 hours, I received exactly 64 spam comments posted to this blog. They all come to my email for approval first (for just this reason) and I haven’t seen anything like this before. I’m still trying to piece it together, given this information:
- The comments all contain a generic remark that could be used on any blog, such as “wow, cool, i’ve been looking for this info all day!”
- Each comment has one word intentionally misspelled, such as “cheeerd.”
- I have SI Captcha anti-spam installed here, so this was either a sophisticated Captcha-breaking bot or someone was paid to enter the Captcha codes.
- Most interestingly, there is no motive I can find. They are not linking back to a website selling $18 Nikes. For the URL, they always put yahoo.com or google.com or something else totally generic. The email addresses seem valid but don’t have any rhyme or reason to them.
Clearly someone wanted to get a bunch of comments up here, but they weren’t going to drive traffic anywhere and didn’t advertise anything. My only guess is that this was a recon mission to see which blogs are penetrable. Whoever masterminds these could just Google the terms including misspellings, and find the blogs this tactic has worked on, and direct the real spamming efforts towards those.
SEO enthusiasts or anyone with knowledge of spam tactics, please let me know what this was all about, because it’s left me really curious.