The Wacky World of Comment Spam

Spam—it’s not just what’s for dinner anymore. If you have a web contact form on your company’s website, or comments enabled on your company’s blog, we’re pretty sure you’ve seen your fair share of comment spam. You’ll be happy to know that spam comments are completely harmless, despite the fact that they are more annoying than realizing you accidentally purchased unfrosted Pop-Tarts at the grocery store (why do these even exist?!).

But despite how annoying web spam comments are, they are also sometimes pretty entertaining. So for this week’s Casual Friday post at Blue Corona, we’ve compiled some of the weirdest spam comments we can find.

Enjoy them while I walk you through the evolution of the spam comment.

How Comment Spam Has Evolved

Comment spam (also known as blog spam or social spam) occurs when a blogger posts random comments (usually automatically) promoting commercial services or products on a blog or discussion board that displays comments with hyperlinks. The goal of comment spammers is often to use the link created by their comment to improve their site’s search engine ranking. The comments themselves almost never contribute to the conversation or add any value to the blog post, and usually say something along the lines of “nice article, thanks for sharing.”

Most of these spam comments are auto generated with a script or software.

In order to provide better service to its users and reduce the amount of comment spam they receive, blogging services like WordPress have developed various anti-spam measures. For example, current versions of WordPress come with Akismet (a comment spam fighter) installed by default.

Google Recommendations for Reducing User-Generated Spam

According to Google, there are several ways to reduce and prevent comment spam on your website:

• Use anti-spam tools
• Turn on comment moderation
• Use “nofollow” tags
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or META tags
• Disable comments or guestbook on your site
• Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming
• And more

Do Anti-Spam Tools Work?

Most spam tools work by requiring commenters to prove they’re a human and not spam software with what’s known as a CAPTCHA—“completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” They usually take the form of distorted image of numbers and letters.

Although CAPTCHAs are somewhat effective at reducing spam, the extra step of deciphering a CAPTCHA can often be too much for some of your site users—potentially reducing your conversion rate. In a blog post on Moz.com, one writer reports an estimated 3.2 percent loss in conversions.

Because CAPTCHAs represent an extra hurdle your clients have to jump in order to contact you, we usually don’t recommend adding them to your web contact forms. Especially since as web spammers become more evolved, they’re becoming increasingly able to block and circumvent CAPTCHAs. According to Blue Corona’s Master of Web Ceremonies, Chase Wolf, “There are some really advanced robot programs that have been specially coded to bypass image-based CAPTCHAs now. So it is hard to say that even those are 100 percent effective.”

Sample Spam

Even after you’ve followed Google’s method for reducing and preventing web spam, our guess is, you’ll never get away from it completely. So do what we do—laugh at them.

Here are some of our favorite responses to our open-ended sidebar content field that simple asks, “How can we help you?”

Undeniably imagine that that you sttaed. Your favourite reason appeared to be on the internet the simplest factor to be aware of. I say to you, I certainly get irked whilst people consider concerns that they just don’t realize about. You controlled to hit the nail upon the highest as well as outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect , other people could take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks

I certainly get irked whilst people spam my company’s website.

Until I found this I thhuogt I’d have to spend the day inside.

Nah, gurl. Go enjoy the sunlight.

I want to express my aoirecpatipn to this writer for bailing me out of such a issue. Just after browsing through the the web and obtaining things which were not helpful, I figured my entire life was done. Being alive without the presence of strategies to the difficulties you have resolved through your good article content is a crucial case, as well as the kind which could have in a wrong way damaged my entire career if I hadn’t come across your website. Your own understanding and kindness in dealing with almost everything was excellent. I’m not sure what I would’ve done if I hadn’t come across such a point like this. I’m able to at this point relish my future. Thanks a lot very much for your specialized and effective guide. I won’t be reluctant to refer the sites to any individual who desires guidance about this subject.

Blue Corona: We Save Lives.

Closing Thoughts

Maybe someone should organize a conference for comment spammers? During this conference, there should be at least one session on “how to be funny.” Then, in the future, at least we can all get a chuckle as we’re deleting you from our site/blog/etc.

Want to get your spam under control? Contact Blue Corona today.

Got funny or unusual web spam? Send it our way or tweet us @BlueCorona.