May
24
2006Stupid Blog Spammer Tricks
24
2006
One of my duties at Zoom Information is building the next version of our “People Directory”, a ginormous list of, well, people. We are quite interested in how many of our people-pages get indexed by Google. In order to keep tabs on that, we add a code to the bottom of each page, which helps us easily determine our page count. For example, if you perform this Google search which looks for “L000003″ within just www.zoominfo.com, you will see 210,000 results. This means that Google has indexed 210,000 of our “Level 3″ pages.
You may be wondering what this has to do with this article’s title. Well, a blogger named Peter Kaminski has been tracking some unusual blog spam comments that have been popping up lately. They tend to look something like this:
Posted by: Courtney Gidts | Nov 14, 2005 3:12:18 PM. I’ve managed to save up roughly $53602 in my bank account, but I’m not sure if I should buy a house or …
A blogger is left to wonder why a spammer would leave a message like this - no hyperlinks, no obvious agenda, no real point.
Well, the key is in the “$53602″. You see, bloggers are increasingly using various tricks to block “comment spam”. So, blog spammers have a real interest in determining which ones do NOT. How do you do that? Well, you assign a unique “key” to your comments which you can check against later - much like our people directory page ID tags.
Do a Google search for “Gidts $53602” and you’ll learn that the comment was successfully posted to a blog entry on Worthwhilemag.com. Keep a database of these numerical ID’s and their associated blog URL’s, automate Google searches to see which ones come up with results, and - voila - you now have a giant list of vulnerable blogs. Since there are about 100 bazillion blogs online, even if 99% of them were to block spam, this clever entrepreneur will be able to find the 1 bazillion that don’t… and use that information to turn a hefty profit.
Don’t try this at home.