February 21, 2008
Attack of the Comment Monkeys
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Due to my long-time use of do-follow, this blog has become identified as a high pagerank do-follow blog. I do believe that the use of dofollow has had positive impact on this blog, but I’m heavily targeted by what must be cheap-labor outsourced blog comment farms.
These are real people posting pseudo-real comments on my old posts. Some of them are lazy, “Thanks for the great post!” comments, but others are clearly reading the post to make some real looking comment.
This one was posted from somewhere in Europe on an old blog post about my getting back into running, last summer:
Nice to know how you come up with new ideas. Some people have their own techniques, I suppose. I too like to think while I run but, I have to still find some time for it. I recently read on a fitness blog that if you don’t concentrate (on your muscles) while running, it may not provide you with good results. Anyways, I don’t think you’re as desperate as some people I know to lose a few extra pounds, and you even look fine. I think you have a medium build. Keep up the good work.
It’s a pretty good comment, but I think you’ll agree, just a bit weird. The comment URL is to a site that they’re clearly working on for SEO.
Let’s look at where they they came from:
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=010671241065582761164%3A8ceodxhtdi0&
cof=FORID%3A11&q=exercise&sa=Search+DoFollow+Sites&ad=w9
&num=10&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ezbusinessneeds.com%2Fpremium-
dofollow-search.php%3Fcx%3D010671241065582761164%253A8ceodxhtdi0
%26cof%3DFORID%253A11%26q%3Dexercise%26sa%3DSearch%2BDoFollow
%2BSites
So it looks like this ezbusinessneeds.com website has a tool for performing searches on dofollow websites. This blog comment monkey did a search for “exercise” using this tool, which is likely a custom search on a list of websites.
Indeed they do. Here it is, decoded: Check it out. My blog post they commented on is #10 on that search.
Losers.
So what to do?
I could just keep reviewing all comments manually, which I do, but I think with some plugins, I could discourage some of the commenting behavior that I get.
I don’t want to turn off comments on all posts that have reached a certain age, as I’ve got some old posts that have some amazing discussions going on them for many, many months. One post has nearly 1000 real comments from real people who don’t even post a URL. Imagine that!
Is there a plugin that turns off comments on old posts but lets me override and keep comments turned on for some?
Is there a plugin that will track the referral url for any commenter so I can quickly see where they came from to help me decide if they’re legit?
Wordpress pros, what’s out there?
UPDATE: Here’s the link that Vlad meant to post. Of course any post about comment spam should at least mention Lucia’s plugins. Thanks for the reminder, Vlad.
Scott,
Looks like this post is now # 1 on that search.
Why isn’t blog spam prevented by just adding a javascript handler that won’t let the comment fields contain a ‘www’ or ‘http’ anywhere in the field? Seems like a simple fix to a growing problem. Sure, my name won’t link to my blog/site, but is that a big deal?
Have you considered requiring registration for people who want to comment? Or, you could just block Russia, China and India from viewing your blog.
I don’t want to require registration. I hate when I see that on other blogs. BTW, I don’t think that’ll help much. I get several registrations a day from spammers with .pl email addresses. I bet these monkeys would gladly register.
Blocking countries would probably have some impact. That might be worth a try.
The ultimate irony here is that your link back to the tool that the spammers used to target your blog now returns you as the top result for this exact post.
I wonder if seeing “Attack of the Comment Monkeys” will deter any of the monkeys.
This won’t solve the problem, but a simple captcha plugin like “Did You Pass Math?” http://www.herod.net/dypm/
might outsmart some monkeys.
HAHA, that’s awesome. I do hope they see it.
I have used the Did you pass math captcha previously. I even published some modifications to it to fix some annoyances with it.
http://www.jangro.com/a/2007/02/01/buh-bye-askimet/
Once I put SK2 back in and started reviewing all comments, that became unnecessary.
[...] - Linkshare’s New Publisher Dashboard: ReveNews - Jangro’s DoFollow Blues [...]
Scott,
I have been using Lucia’s Linky Love
It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but it does help to keep the monkeys away.
Thanks for that Vlad. Clearly that was written with these same concerns in mind. I’ll give that a go.
Scott,
I meant to leave the link to the latest version of Lucia’s plugin. The new version allows you to “dofollow” trackbacks immediately. Check your e-mail.
You can always make it so users have to post 3, 5 or 10 times before getting a link back, I’m not sure if that would decrease the spam though.
One plugin that I like is DoFollow by Kimmo Suominen. It allows you to nofollow individual posts. So you can just nofollow some comments while following most. It is as simple as just clicking a link (so easier than some of the other plugins methods of doing this).
It doesn’t really do the things you were hoping for though. Maybe they would add the features you like?
Okay, this may be a dumb question, but why not just go back to using nofollow and make a post that let’s all of the idiot spammers know their efforts will be futile. You can always quietly go back to dofollow and then the people that you care about receiving the benefits will receive them. Is this a possibility?
Difficult decision to make as to whether to turn off dofollow.
I’d go with John Hunters comment and turn it off for a while to get rid of the spammers and then introduce again quietly after some time.
@coldfusion: I believe that was MY suggestion to turn off the dofollow for a while…
Sorry Chris I read the name above the post and not below, use to seeing commentators name above.
That’s okay, coldfusion, I do it all the time!
I’ve really struggled myself with this whole dofollow/nofollow thing. Maybe if Google had never made a big deal about it in the first place and just let things develop naturally we wouldn’t have this situation with spammers. My own website uses the plugin to disable the nofollow, but I have purposely not advertised that fact to prevent the spam infestation.
If you care about Google then use nofollow everywhere, otherwise just manually review comments and let Google to eat a big piece of spam.
Hee Hee, Nice picture I have noticed that putting the do follow plugin in my blogs does increase traffic and more people leave comments.
The same situation happened to me on a blog I used to run. I get lots of spam and lots of what looks like clean comments but very different from the post’s subject. What they are actually doing is creating some related content around the link to give it a stronger value.Or at least that is what they are trying. And Akismet is not that great when it comes to stop spam. It stops also lots of really useful comments so is a tricky situation.
I am not sure what to do next.
I think Mr. Peter Davis is correct when he suggests users be registered. You could also add one of the math “are you human” plug-ins. The blog is great. Most of the comments are relevant. It must take time to sort through the junk but I think it is worth the effort. It all depends on how busy you are. Thank you for your hard work.
Robert, thanks for kind words.
I think these monkeys can do math and fill in CAPTCHAs, and judging by the hundreds and hundreds of registrations I get from people in eastern europe, they can register as well.
Besides, I believe pretty strongly that requiring registration on a blog is a comment kiss of death. I’d much rather clean up a hundred spam posts than turn away a single real commenter because of hoops to jump through.
I notice on my blogs a lot of my spam comments come from china… I personally think in the next few years search engine will not even count blog links, heck google is already starting not to accept blog comments as backlinks!
Ian
Great…info…
[...] a good thing. My PR6 do-follow blog status has landed me pretty squarely at the top of the “Comment Monkey Todo List”. I’d love to fall off their radar. Are you guys reading? Nothing to see [...]
Pretty good article. I like it, keep it up.
[...] monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS [...]