Surely everyone who has ever written a blog knows, that even with akismet and all those other fancy gizmos, spam is constantly there. It can be characterized as landfills and trash dumps of modern technology, that just keeps piling up and there’s always more. But stating the existence of spam nowadays is like saying we need air to breathe. Pointless. What I want to focus on is how spam comments are evolving to trick us into clicking approve.

Here’s some statistics:

Email spam is done by about 5 million botnets, that send 88% of all spam messages. 90% of spam is in English (that’s understandable) and 91% contains links. 66% is about pharmaceutical things like viagra,cialis etc. In 2010 alone 107 billion mails were sent, out of which 89,1% was spam. Good news is that the amount of spam is decreasing by about 1% each year. The biggest fall is in email spam, because of better filters, and people simply ignoring those messages after learning how they work. A lot of spam moved to blog comments though, either to move traffic to other websites, or increase google popularity. So what kinds of spam are there?

Praise spam

Praise spam is the most common one – everyone wants to hear compliments, and if we get a comment that says “great blog! I’ve bookmarked it!” or “Great writing style, keep it up!” or thins like:

1. This would be the best weblog for anybody who wishes to discover this subject.
2. Wonderful article. I’m dealing with a few these issues.
3. This is actually a very good posted post, and I have bookmarked this web site for future reference.
4. Hi, this has been an excellent read and in addition I have bookmarked this webpage
5. A truly amazing article. Thanks for sharing you’re wealth of knowledge with us once again
6. It is a excellent suggestions particularly to people new to blogosphere, quick and correct information
7. Greetings! I would just like to thank you for the first class info you have here on this post.
8. Fantastic goods from you, man. I have understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely magnificent.

Help offerings (mostly SEO)

That comes from the fact that most blogs are not popular. That’s how life works and we should learn to deal with it. So when we see a help offer: to boost our stats, to earn more money, whatever – we unintentionally take notice of that comment before realizing it is spam. Some people apparently don’t realize that, because the spam bots are still doing this.

1. Hello, I found your website by searching Google, but I noticed it was not on the first page.
2. I found you on Google so I thought I’d share this tip with you. There is a WordPress SEO addon that does automated SEO for your blog
3. make your blog a source of income that can count on
4. My team provides professional article writing, and we are able to do it for $0.01 per word – that’s $4 for a 400 word article.
5. There are a lot of approaches in which you can preserve cash.
6. Hi, check how to make more money with your blog

Pointing out mistakes (that’s a new one)

If praise isn’t really your thing, maybe criticism is. Or maybe if a bot is smart enough (yeah, right!) to criticize you, then it’s not a bot, but a real comment you can approve? Silly them ;)

1. of course like your web site but you have to check the spelling on quite a few of your posts
2. I’m not sure I completely agree with the point and view

Total gibberish and idiomatic idiocy

Sometimes what we get is a string of words or phrases taken from books, randomized and weird. It looks like it’s some twisted, drug induced poetry and sometimes it is. I actually like this type of spam sometimes – especially when I can compile a couple of those into a song, that’s as deep lyrically as Radioheads gibberish ;) (I still like their music though)

1. you command get got an edginess over that you wish be delivering the following. unwell unquestionably come more formerly again since exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this increase.
2. A fall into a pit, a gain in your wit
3. Great mens sons seldom do well

We can learn to fight it or we can learn to ignore it. But we must be aware that bots are a considerable part of our reader base. So this post is a tribute to them. Thank you for visiting my site bots! ;)