“Thank You, Google” Spam, What’s the Point?
Jens Meiert, July 6, 2007 / March 18, 2008.
This entry is filed under Uncategorized.
Does your weblog get spammed with “Thank you, Google” comments, too? For weeks I receive about 10-20 comments each day that include this phrase. Even now that I just checked last night’s blog spam, “Thank you google!!!” here, “p.s. Thank you google” there.
What’s the point in that? Though it’s almost always written the same way and thus probably just one spammer who sends out these “acknowledgements”, I’m curious about the reasons – is it the naïf hope that Google would judge the spammed document more relevant? Is it in order to “camouflage” the comment so that it rather passes moderation? Is it stupid “copy writing”? Is it a bold “real” thank you, in hope for bad spam filters and/or absent-minded moderators? All told?
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Comments
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On July 6, 11:28 CEST, Tiffi said:
Thank you, Google!
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On July 6, 11:45 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
…
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On July 6, 12:52 CEST, Phil said:
I agree! I have never understood spam with seemingly rubbish messages like that. I particularly don’t understand the spam comments left with the URL http://google.com. What are those spammers trying to achieve?!
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On July 6, 12:59 CEST, Rike said:
Thank you, Google
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On July 6, 13:33 CEST, Jerry said:
I think all these nonsense spam comments are being created to mess with spam filters. Especially centralized spam filters like Akismet are a good target, because if you “crack” it, you have spamming access to a lot of WordPress blogs.
My site (and my email) get tons of those that make no sense at all. The most confusing are the ones that link to yahoo.com and google.com and nothing else.
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On July 9, 12:44 CEST, Markus said:
I know that too… ridiculous. Dont know the point either.
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On July 9, 17:40 CEST, Edward Clarke said:
I wonder how many are duff runs of a harvesting tool that’s currently being written?
It could be the coder is doing thousands like that and scripting for the response. Every time it’s executed to test the code, out goes the junk.
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On July 9, 20:02 CEST, CEE said:
Yep this really sounds familiar
.. Just filter out google comments. What’s the change that someone actually replies with google in it. Right?!
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On July 10, 9:13 CEST, Edward Clarke said:
CEE said: “Yep this really sounds familiar
.. Just filter out google comments. What’s the change that someone actually replies with google in it. Right?!”I would have thought quite high. The problem is how do you proactively chase keywords? I block “viagra”, they use “v1agra”, I then block “google”, they then use “g0ogle”. It just doesn’t work based purely on how resource intensive this exercise is.
I still stand by my “testing the code” theory and if I’m right, the spam should cease as quickly as it started.
Spam must have a purpose based on the cost of bandwidth needed to send it. This has no economic value other than ensuring emails reach inboxes. Once tested and verified, then the real spam begins.
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On July 11, 11:06 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
I just noticed that most “Thank you” spam appears to advertise Czech sites … Is it the same on your sites?
The spam problem’s of course complex, and definitely interesting: Some people must earn much money with it, they also possess a lot of power (remember Blue Frog?), and they appear to manage “general” spamming inboxes, fora, blogs, and so on (though that’s quite lossy, and as opposed to “specific” spamming that targets certain sites).
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On July 11, 15:03 CEST, Edward Clarke said:
I just noticed that most “Thank you” spam appears to advertise Czech sites
I’m having a real problem with Polish owned sites lately. Getting the usual: “keep up the good work” and “yeah cool”.
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On July 12, 11:35 CEST, Anonymous said:
Maybe it has to do with
rel="nofollow"which has been advertised by Google and which is used for blog comments in many blog systems. -
On July 12, 12:43 CEST, Edward Clarke said:
Maybe it has to do with rel=”nofollow” which has been advertised by Google and which is used for blog comments in many blog systems.
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On July 14, 1:21 CEST, Tomasz Gorski said:
“I just noticed that most “Thank you” spam appears to advertise Czech sites … Is it the same on your sites?” I must agree they spam also my mail box i have about 10-15 mails from .cz blogs (made for seo) I don’t agree that nofollow works they will put spam - the rison is simple they work for SEO not only for google also for yahoo and msn and nofollow works only for google so i blocked comments for some time (only for registered users) but the spam robots hack this and they register on one of my blogs and put they blog comments everyday. The only way to stop this is to block the comments
Greetings from Poland -
On August 22, 1:41 CEST, Ben Buchanan said:
I’m also getting an increased number of actual on-topic comments, which then link to spam sites. ie. the URLs are definitely spam, but the comments are real. If it’s done by a script, it’s done by a really good one.
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On August 22, 13:09 CEST, frotherDoc said:
the URLs are definitely spam, but the comments are real. If it’s done by a script, it’s done by a really good one.
Can you show an example?
Of the comments, not the urls
