Spammers, Splogs, Sportals

You’ve heard me mentioning my comment spammer pests. These are the guys who spam my blog with comment posts containing links to something they’re trying to promote.

Sometimes they add nonsensical text to their posts; "I’m so bored", or kudos; "Good site!", "Great Job!" or "May we exchange links?". All nonsense, attempting to add to the ‘realism’ that it’s an actual comment.

I did some digging into the comment spam ecosystem, of which many blogs (including this one) are an unwilling part. Here are some notes:

• The links they post are intended to improve the search rankings for their product sites, simply by their discovery by search engine spiders who crawl the web.
• Improved rankings for their keywords improve their search result rankings, which means they bubble to the top of search engine results.
• The links themselves typically point to Sportals, massive collections of computer-generated links which themselves link out to advertisers who have paid for the comment spam services.
• If the spammer is the service provider themselves, they are using comment spam to self-promote their products.
• The comment spammers might also be driving traffic to Splogs, computer-generated blogs containing content from articles posted in legitimate blogs. The Wikipedia article to which I point has an interesting discussion about what constitutes a Splog versus a Spam Blog (comments containing links, which sounds more like my problem).

If the search engines are fooled, the spammer’s results bubble to the top. Some number of real users will click on these links, driving traffic to the spam sites. The spam sites host advertisements placed there by Google or MSN, and if the users click on the ad links, the spam site gets paid.

Update: The 14.09 issue of Wired has a nicely-written article on this topic. The article goes into far greater detail and is worth a peek. Note: you may have to search the Wired News Archives for 14.09 and spin through the results.