The Spam In Our Blogging Lives

I’d like to share a comment with you that I got on one of my posts:

HI Mitch

I just loved reading your articles. 😀

The best thing which I really like about your articles is, you covers each and every thing in your articles which makes your article more helpful.

I have seen people love to read those articles more which are easy to understand and can help a lot. And you always write such kind of articles.

Either way, Thanks for this wonderful article.

SPAM

Carlos ZGZ via Compfight

Isn’t that nice? Looks like a great comment doesn’t it? Unfortunately, not only is it not a good comment, it’s actually spam. How do I know this?

Look at the comment again. Do you have any idea what article it was made on? For that matter, isn’t this the type of comment that could go on any article you read, only changing the name?

Oh yeah; it already has shown up on many articles. Not on my blog, but here and here and here and here. Actually, it comes up over a thousand times if you do the search; now that’s a shame!

On two of these blogs the writer of the article responded to it as if it was a real comment; I thought I should tell them but decided to keep it to myself, so only you wonderful readers will know the truth.

Something I’ve written about in the past is learning how to recognize spam that can make it through your spam filters. It looks like a real comment, but if it doesn’t address the article in any way then you know it’s fake. For instance, here’s another fake comment I received:

Well done Mitch. You have nicely explained the rules of marketing with details. great work

That was pretty lame wasn’t it? It actually went to my Pending area only because I use CommentLuv Premium, where I was able to then download Anti Backlinker and tell it to put any comment without a gravatar into moderation. Since many of you don’t have the first, you can’t get the second, so it’s possible you’ll have comments like this on your blog. Actually, it shows up on Google over 2,300 times with a slight variation after the first few words of the sentence.

Speaking of not really trying…

I read your full article and its really interesting a lot. Thank You For providing us great articles…

Come on now; I’m almost insulted that someone wasted their time with that. lol Actually, depending on what you might want to check this one comes up the fewest number of times, but it’s still repeated… must be relatively new.

How about one more:

Very interesting. I finished up my post for today yesterday and it posted in the wee hours when I was still asleep and yet you and I make some very similar points right down to the Morgan Freeman quote.

As I said in my post, though I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and knew no black people whatsoever, I was pretty aware of a lot of black history. I don’t remember it being taught in school so maybe I got it from television.

I like to hear the entire scope of history and not isolated bits extracted for some specific agenda.

This is only a sample. It’s pretty good isn’t it? It was actually a very long comment and it might have fooled most people. How did I know it was spam? Because it was an actual comment that someone else wrote on this article from February that, because I remembered us having a conversation about it at the time, and the comment not fitting on the article it showed up on, I knew was spam. This one was at least creative, if misplaced.

This is the kind of thing that many people miss because it’s a legitimate comment… just not on the right article, which made it easy. Sometimes it’s on the same article which makes it difficult; I’ve missed that a few times here and there.

Overall I’m pretty lucky when it comes to spam. The truly bad and fake stuff almost always finds its way into the spam filter, with some occasionally making it into preview mode. However, sometimes they end up on this blog or one of my other blogs, and for the most part I know it’s spam and I get rid of it pretty quickly.

Here’s a truth; not all spam is intentionally spam. Some are just bad comments left by people who think saying “nice post” has any meaning to the writer. You need to get rid of those comments as quick as possible also because if your blog looks like one that will accept them, you’ll have all sorts of bad comments and spam showing up on your site and the search engines will think your site isn’t worth bothering with.

There’s always a question whether or not search engines look at blog comments. I doubt that’s the case. However, I tend to believe that their bots will see lousy comments, notice that the links are a bit dodgy, and penalize the site in some way. Do you want that happening to your blog when you’re spending so much time trying to write great content?

Just a bit of a tutorial for you on this Monday morning. Happy blogging and moderating to you all! πŸ˜‰


Addendum:You won’t believe this but if you look at the comments below you’ll see that someone came by & left the exact same comment that I highlighted at the beginning of this post; ridiculous! I removed the information from that comment so the guy wouldn’t get any benefit but shared it so we could call it out. However, it came from someone calling himself Abdul Samadessani, email address ab***************@gm***.com, website bloggingearning.com and Twitter handle @samad_100. I’ve sent contact via Twitter calling him out or whomever he hired; let’s see if he responds. Until he does, go ahead and abuse this guy because, trust me, you’ll probably be seeing this same comment on your blog one of these days, if it’s not already there.
 

60 thoughts on “The Spam In Our Blogging Lives”

  1. Ha! I’m flattered that someone thought my comment was so good that they recreated it later. I’ve seen duplicated comments like that on the same post which is quite absurd. I get a sense of deja vu (as I did reading this post) and then scroll up the page to find out why a comment seems so familiar–because it was already said.

    I’m not sure why, but I very rarely get any spam on my blog anymore. Maybe Blogger is doing a better job of screening, but there is rarely even spam in my junk file. This is not so on the A to Z Blog which is in my name, but even there the spam is far less than it used to be.

    I can spot spam pretty readily now, but back when I was first blogging I’d get excited to get the flattering sounding stuff. Back then I didn’t even know that spam in blog comments existed and I was just happy to get a comment.

    Lee

    1. Arlee, I think we all fall into that trap at first, just happy to have received a comment. I’m pretty good now also but not perfect; that might be a pipe dream. lol

      I don’t mind the stuff that ends up in the spam filter for one reason or another. I don’t intentionally moderate anything so most of the time I figure it either belongs there for some reason or someone’s using Chrome and it doesn’t like my blog… or my blog doesn’t like Chrome all the time. Freakiest thing. lol

  2. Spam wins. Most of them are bots and others are humans who copy paste with slight variation.

    It is becoming difficult these days to sort them out.

    I get 10 spam comments to 1 real comment in ratio.

    Luckily most of them get caught in the spam filter. Thanks for the enlightenment. It is an ongoing battle, I guess

    1. Rohan, it’s been a battle since I first started blogging years ago. However, spam only wins if we leave it on our blogs and don’t know to get rid of it. After all, most spam is faceless, and that stuff will never beat the real thing.

  3. Hey Mitch, good on you for pointing this out. I get a lot of these comments. They rarely get through. Sometimes if I know that English is not their native tongue and I know they’ve tried I will let some comments go live. But not when it’s obvious fluff.

    What surprises me is how some bloggers accept this type of comment.

    1. Pete, it used to surprise me until I saw people I knew who were pretty smart yet new to blogging responding to stuff like this. It can be hard for the uninitiated to figure it out, which is why I write about it & share posts like these from time to time.

  4. Hello Mitch,

    Well, this is my first visit to your website and the first article I came across is about spamming in blogging lives.
    Absolutely correct, spamming in this industry has grown to a great extent, people just wanna leave comment that’s it, they do not even show up after getting a reply from the blog owner. Why? Because they’ve got what they wanted, now who the hell are you…

    Like you said – “not all spam is intentionally spam. Some are just bad comments left by people who think saying β€œnice post” has any meaning to the writer”, it actually depends according to me, like I have a tech based blog and if any user comes to a page where I have shared a tip or solution to any technical problem and leaves the comment “Nice tips, it helped me a lot” then I would only approve of it if the URL/Website field is left empty as that would be a genuine user who was only searching for the help and the purpose of his/her comment was to say thank only. Isn’t it?

    On the second note, I read in your other post that your blog completed 11 years in February,2016. Although it’s late but Belated Happy Anniversary to your blog πŸ™‚

    Thank You,
    Karan

    1. Thanks for the kudos Karan; always appreciated.

      I wanted to touch on one thing you said, that being not coming back to respond when bloggers reply. I’ve noticed that lots of blogs I leave comments on never send me anything telling me that my comment has been responded to. I test all my blogs from time to time to make sure they work, but I don’t think most people check out their own blogs in the same way. So, sometimes I don’t remember where I’ve commented since I do it often; that’s more on the blog owner than me.

      You do make a good point that if you’re writing a tutorial post that you may not have left much for a person to say other than “thank you” or something similar. I’m of the opinion that if there’s nothing else to say and you’re new to that person it’s probably better to just leave it alone.

      1. I had to come here again else you would say “The one talking about not showing up again didn’t showed up too” πŸ˜›

        I agree, most of the blogs don’t have the system to notify of the replies. But like you have a checkbox for notifying and I believe if a person’s intention is to really communicate and discuss over the post then he/she will definitely check it out.

        See you soon on your other posts as well πŸ™‚

  5. Thanks for sharing that backlinker plugin…I get a decent amount of spam comments unfortunately. If the comment does not have anything to do with my content I trash it. I am not rewarding dofollow links to people who just can’t be bothered reading my posts (and trust me, they aren’t overly intellectual either!).

    1. Glad to share the information Kathleen. That plugin gives you a lot of different options, such as sending any comment without a gravatar to spam; love that! πŸ™‚

  6. Hi Mitch,

    Ah spam! It never ceases to amaze me how people who sell dodgy Adult products, or slimming pills, or hair pieces, or cars, think I’m going to accept their link-filled comment on my blog. But they try leaving them any way.

    Like you, my spam filter works well and captures these in its nets and dumps them in my Delete box.

    Unfortunately, I’ve had a few legitimate comments get captured as spam. I don’t know if this has happened to you but because I check my spam comments before sending them off to spam heaven, I have managed to save a few and “Approve” them.

    The unfortunate reason for this is that these comments come from bloggers with “spammy-looking” sites, often with “spammy-looking” URLs.

    It’s a shame. But I think there are some people out there, beginner bloggers who are maybe still getting the hang of blogging and don’t know that their sites are coming across to (Google) in this way.

    I think the cure is to host sites on reputable servers and to choose domain names that are professional.

    For those accepting these comments, as @Peter says, don’t do it because by accepting them, you are giving them a link to your site. This in turn can get you tarred with the same brush and your web presence could be affected negatively.

    What’s your take on this, Mitch?

    – Tom

    1. First, thanks for visiting the blog Tom; welcome! πŸ™‚

      Second, because of the plugins I use I find that there are legitimate comments that either show up in spam or in the trash filter; that’s a strange one. It could be because of the website; it could be because of the IP address, which is a biggie that many people don’t understand. Overall, I think those folks who are legitimately leaving comments and end up in filters should hope that the blogs they’re leaving comments on have owners who will take the time to find their comment and make it live. Sometimes there’s nothing one can do, especially with shared hosting.

  7. Hi Mitch,

    I saw that Morgan Freeman comment when it was emailed to me by your blog and thought, hmm, How did Mitch miss that spam comment? lol

    Thanks for the illumination.

    1. Yeah, I caught it Rasheed but it was “good enough” to slip through the filters. That’s the trickiness of the stuff and why we have to be vigilant.

  8. You don’t need to worry about Mitch Rasheed, he’s always on top of things. I always think to myself when I get those comments in the emails, “There’s one for Mitch to delete” or “I’ll wonder if he will turn this one into a post?” πŸ˜€

  9. Hi Mitch,

    In my early blogging days, I used to publish comments like a single sentence or even just few words praising the article. And the ones coming from irrelevant niche sites too.

    Definitely most of the spams get filtered. But, from the exempted ones, many newbies really find it challenging to decide on spam.

    Being new to this blogosphere (and also trying to reach their commenting target), many bloggers try to write a simple “thank you for sharing” type comment. Do you think we should trash them? It may be because they have not learnt the commenting skills yet.

    One thing, how we can find out that the first type of comment in this article is spam? It seems to fit on any article, it will add on, and when the name field and the website link seems right?

    Thank you for explaining so many examples. Take care and have a great day ahead πŸ™‚

    1. Hi Manidipa. You actually just figured out how you can tell it’s spam. If it doesn’t address the topic, it’s spam. If there’s one line about the topic but not about any content in the article; it’s spam. The other stuff… way too easy, and hopefully most of it is showing up in your spam filter.

      As for the other comments… I trash them. On this blog alone I think I’ve written at least 25 articles about blog commenting over the years and there’s lots of others. Frankly, if you remove those comments those people aren’t coming back to your blog anyway so they’re not worth worrying about. If they actually care, they’ll learn how to do it right.

  10. HI Mitch

    I just loved reading your articles.

    The best thing which I really like about your articles is, you covers each and every thing in your articles which makes your article more helpful.

    I have seen people love to read those articles more which are easy to understand and can help a lot. And you always write such kind of articles.

    Either way, Thanks for this wonderful article.

      1. I did decide to leave it Rasheed, but can you believe both the audacity and the stupidity? I just can’t believe this is a real person; it almost has to be a bot unless this guy is the stupidest person in the world. Sheesh! lol

    1. Wow, isn’t this ironic? This very comment is in the blog post; what kind of morons is this world generating? Normally I don’t get into insulting people but I’m assuming the email is also fake, and if it’s not then someone needs to ridicule this guy and the people who hired him need to be lucky that I’ve removed the link to their website because they’re moments away from one of those Google letters telling them they’re about to be penalized. This guy needs scorn heaped upon him; y’all, go for it. lol

      1. Buddy! I Just Wanted To Make This Comment Looks Like Funny!
        I Have Read Your Whole Article And Copied The Comment Which You Have Mentioned Above πŸ˜€
        Hope You Try To Understand πŸ˜€
        I’m Not Doing Anything But Just Making People Smile πŸ˜›
        I Know That Your Content Is Awesome.
        Hope You Understand Dear!
        Regards,
        Abdul Samad πŸ˜€

      2. If you think that that comment is not good you can either delete that πŸ™‚
        I don’t want to make anyone hurt.

      3. The problem is you posted the exact same comment on this blog twice in one week on two different articles, and it’s the same exact comment on at least a thousand other blog comments by people all over the internet. You’re right, you’re not doing anything except making people smile… which means you’re not even reading the articles, and you obviously didn’t read this one since once again you didn’t comment on the article or apologize for what you’ve been doing because you didn’t know you were being ridiculed for being a spammer. I hope you’re proud…

  11. The IP address is probably one of the drawbacks of being on a shared host. If you have a whole lot of shady sites on your shared hosting account it could have a negative effect on your Google rating. Or am I getting it wrong, again πŸ˜‰

    1. It’s not the IP address but the actual domain name, which was someone’s blog. If I’d copied that first I could have visited it & chastised them.

  12. Check out what Matt Cutts has to say about shared hosting and same IP addresses

    Oh well, I was trying to leave a link but it wouldn’t let me. Said I had one too many links when it was the only one lol I’ll put it on the chess site πŸ˜‰

    1. I saw it on the other site. Thing is, it was written in 2009 and I’m not sure it’s still valid. All of my websites are on the same account and I’ve been known to link them to each other when I feel it’s appropriate, and if it’s hurting my rankings… well, you know how I tend to feel about those types of things. lol

  13. That’s so funny because every time… EVERY TIME… there’s about two seconds where I think “woohoo a nice comment!” Then, the slow spam dawning…

  14. I receive a lot of spammy comments like “You website is slow” Your website design is amazing, or some serious spam like “Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors” Only way to tackle these type of comment is to SELECT ALL DELETE PERMANENTLY.

    I have seen some even reply to these bots.

  15. True, but its not your websites that’s a problem but some of your nasty neighbours.

    Like your said though, Google may have worked away around that so it can ignore the bad side of the neighbourhood.

    1. I hope so, although you’re also right on the IP thing. Matter of fact, now I need you to leave me another comment late because I might have figured something out regarding why your messages don’t immediately show up.

    1. Yay, it worked! When you started talking about IP addresses I remembered that I’ve blocked lots of them based on the first 3 numbers. Turns out yours is one of those numbers, beginning with 122. I removed that, and now you’re good! πŸ˜€

  16. Hi Mitch,
    The issue of spamming is very disturbing, I have come across some of the spam comment you mentioned in the article, it’s so annoying when you consider the extent people go in terms of spamming just because they want to get cheap backlinks.

    Yeah, we all understand how crucial backlinks are in helping a web page rank better, but it should be a win-win situation for both the blog owner and the commenter. It won’t kill taking a few minutes to read the article and then leave a meaningful comment that will add to the quality of discussion, before proceeding to get the desired backlinks.

    When such comment manages to escape the antispam comment plugin on my blog and finds its way into moderation, I don’t waste a second in hitting the delete button because it’s so annoying. Great write up, I had a good time reading it, thanks

    1. Thanks for your comment Obodo. Yeah, these guys are pretty irksome, and most of the time the best we can do is to make sure we find it on our blogs & remove them.

      Course, I’ve just gone a step further. If you look at this post again near the bottom you’ll see that I’ve added the information of either the guy who did it or the website he’s representing at this time. Sometimes we have to call these people out; that’s exactly what I’m doing here; I hope people beat up on him.

  17. Why do people who have a website bother to leave a gmail email address? I reckon that alone points to it being spam.

  18. I do receive such comments on my blog too. On your spam comment example above, your name (Hi Mitch) is mentioned too. The ones I receive on my blog have no names addressed to. Just want to know whether the blog author’s name mentioned in the comment is liable for spam or not?

    1. It absolutely is Rajan. I used to think it couldn’t be spam if my name was in it but realized that I was incorrect on that one. For instance, look at that comment above. All this guy had to do was paste my name in it, leave everything else the same and it’s good to go… for over 1,000 comments on other blogs, including mine twice. See, the assumption is that all spam is automated; sometimes people are paid to spam blogs personally to get around spam filters.

  19. Hi Mitch,

    It’s a long time since I stopped over at your blog…how’re you doing?

    Back to the subject matter…

    Spam is getting ‘sophisticated’ and crazy by the second…when I checked out the culprit of the first comment spam you indicated, I was shocked! That fellow is someone who had hitherto held my respect!

    I sincerely wonder what exactly such folks intend to gain by leaving some generic comments that achieve nothing in essence. Why bother with a comment when you obviously don’t have the time?

    This is a huge SHAME!

    As we continue the spam watch, my dear Mitch, be certain to make the day great!

    Always,
    Akaahan Terungwa

    P.S.

    On my little Info Portal, I completely disabled comments…I was (and still is) tired of tackling both unreasonable humans and bots!

    1. Hey Akaahan; you’re right, it’s been 2 years! Welcome back! πŸ™‚

      It is getting more sophisticated and tricky, which is why we have to pay attention to what’s going on since our blogs are our property. As for this guy, did you notice he commented below (or just above you) and his response to why he’s posting comments like that? Shameful and ridiculous if you ask me. If you’re actually reading the content then comment on the content; if not, go away. I wonder how many people saw that comment on their blogs for what it’s worth and removed it like I did… at least the first time.

      What do they gain? Links back to their blogs. This guy’s blog is ranked nicely so it must be working for him. If only there was a way to report those types of links… oh well, I’ve done my part.

      1. I missed the guy’s comment here and still cannot find it, Mitch…honestly, I would have loved to read his ‘defense’ πŸ™‚

        About why no one else has bothered, many bloggers adore comments to a fault – and would do anything to leave even a spam comment online!

        This is sad – but the reality today!

        Do enjoy the day.

        Always,
        Akaahan Terungwa

      2. Akaahan, just look for “Abdul” in the comments and you’ll easily come across it; lots of smiley faces and… well, you’ll see for yourself. Also, I agree that many bloggers look at those things and really believe their sincere, and we all love flattery.

  20. Hello Mitch,
    I use Akismet for my comment moderation, and it saves me a lot from all these spam comments.
    Akismet not being human won’t be able to identity real comments sometime, so I still have to check my spam to publish real comments that went to spam.
    Thanks for sharing and do have a wonderful day ahead.

  21. I don’t know, but I found the blog really goofy. The spam made by the readers. plus your views made me believe on what on the comments to overlook. Actually, I try to read the whole comment section below to find the thread and forum more interesting. It gives me more knowledge and different perspective of other people as well.
    But still at least I now know on whose comment when and where to skip Time saving blog rather.

  22. Hi Mitch,

    This is an interesting article. In the initial stage of my blogging, I used to approve the comments easily – thought it looks good if your blog post has any comment. Later I realized that it was just a waste. I started using Akismet plugin. It helped me a lot to avoid spam comments. I avoided approving 1-2 lines comments. But I thought long comments are unlikely to be spam. But after reading your article, I think I need to be more specific in approving comments.
    I do agree with your this particular point – If a comment doesn’t address the article in any way then we should know it’s fake. I will keep this point in mind that if the comment talks about my article in any way (appreciating any key points, having further discussion about my content), then it is the most likely to be a valid one.

    And yeah, thanks for telling us about Anti Backlinker plugin, Gonna try this out.

    Regards,
    Mohit

    1. Glad to help Mohit. Anti Backlinker is pretty good; I’m glad Andy created it as a great addon. As for the spam… those guys are getting trickier and that doesn’t make our lives any easier. However, with all the things we can use to block or move spam around so that it’s not getting on our blogs as often it should relieve some people of the fear of receiving it at all. It just takes a little bit of work.

  23. Hello,

    I use Akismet for my comment moderation, and it saves me a lot from all these spammy comments.

    Akismet not being human won’t be able to identify real comments sometimes, so I still have to check my spam to publish real comments that went to spam.

    Thanks for sharing and do have a wonderful day ahead.

    1. Akismet used to be a free plugin but now they’ve gone to a paid model. I’m not saying I’m against paying for services but if I’m going to do it I’d want them to be more accurate and offer more options than they ever have.

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