Attack of the Comment Monkeys

by Scott Jangro on 21 February 2008

monkey-with-keyboard2.jpg

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
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Chris O'Byrne
    @coldfusion: I believe that was MY suggestion to turn off the dofollow for a while... :)
  • 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.
  • Chris O'Byrne
    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?
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Scott
    Thanks for that Vlad. Clearly that was written with these same concerns in mind. I'll give that a go.
blog comments powered by Disqus