Blog Spam Alert

I've noticed an increase in blog-spam in the last 24 hours.  That is, fake comments on my blog for the purpose of adding a URL thereby increasing a web sites ranking for google.

There's no sign of an Edward or his blog at the site referred to.  I've seen blog-spam pointing to this site before, but it was more obviously bogus comments.  They're more inventive this time.  Nothing for it but to delete them and point out that it's not welcome.  They're easy to locate, they all come from the same IP address.

Sender: Edward O hanlan
Url: computer programming-in net

IP Address: 83.146.30.84

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2004
  Well I did a bit of investigation, and got surprised. There seems to be couple entities that have built a business that sells "text link advertising" = spam in such way that these type of forms can be targeted with pseudorandom messages. Combine that with virtual hosts and other techniques email spammers use, there could/will be some movement from email spam to spam these blogs and guestbooks etc.
  
• Anonymous
  May 22, 2004
  Interesting they seem targeted, I have been getting good old HTTP_REFERER spams for well over a year now. I'd guess the idea behind that is that if people display referring URLs (either via a log analysis report or an instant automatic blog thingy) and link back then the amount of backlinks, and therefore google page rank will go up.
  
  So I now have a filter table (see http://idunno.org/misc/referralSpammers.aspx for the current contents), so they never get displayed, and I go through the referrer table once every couple of days to look for new, bad sites.
• Anonymous
  July 23, 2004
  Ya, I heard this firm ( http://www.desktopalert.net ) is shipping a BlogLert application that alerts Blog owners with a queue for approval via an alert. Sounds a lil tiring, but sounds like a kind of remedy.