bloggers strike back against comment spam

Spam (not the ham product) is the lowest form of
"Advertising". "Marketing" is a word that encompasses even the fly-by-night get rich quick and/or enlarge your penis 'businesses' who SPAM.

Spam is an ever growing problem, as peoples emails are getting more protected with blacklists, spamassasins and the likes, and those human authentication systems, where a human eye must pass a spam test before the mail is let through. Email is getting to be near worthless as a communications medium as many marketeers predicted in 97, and spammers are now turning to more fertile grounds.

Blogs, of course! Kalsey has written the anti blog spam manifesto and is getting hundreds of comments and trackbacks from blogs that agree.

Spam in blogs serves not necessarily to advertise the penis enlarger or free cable to the blogs readers, but to jack up the spammers Google Ranking. Rest assured that with MT comment spam blacklists and people who prune their blogs ever since the referral spams started to show up, this tactic is not very likely to work for very long.

Interesting enough, Porn site masters have taken to making pretend blogs, simply ripping another blog of all their stylish html and CSS, then placing a hidden image to the pornsite somewhere in the page. After that they kick back and wait for google to come and index the site, and their smutty URL with it, hoping this will raise their pagerank. Here is an example of a fake blog.

update, Idly.org made a post November 14 and did some detective work in trying to track down the source.

It appears that these sites, using a clean little weblog as a front, are hosting a large amount of porn. I do not recommend visiting the above URL and I would suggest that if you do, you should disable Javascript as then the page is just rendered in text without strobing gif nakedness.

They're attempting to increase the Google Juice of the main page of the site by spamming people's referrers, and thereby increase the juice of the adult-webcam page. Currently, the sites have little or no juice, but they’ve only been at it for a little while.

Spammers are getting ever more clever. Responsible advertisers should help to stop them, as the punters hatred for SPAM is translating into hatred for all forms of advertising.