Why Would I Say I'm a Comment Spammer?

If you are a frequent reader of popular blogs you might occasionally come across blog responses that say "I am a comment spammer." You might ask yourself, "what kind of moron would post that?"

Let me tell you the story of how I become that kind of moron. A cautionary tale, if you will. [Ed. A tale totally worthy of digging. Dig it?]

Once Upon a Time...
A while ago, I signed up for an account on Engadget so I could leave comments. They were for the most part perfectly legitimate comments.

So far, so fine.

Then I thought I'd try my hand at some low-key, pretty innocuous comment spam tactics for a throwaway site I built. The idea was to test this tactic: to see how much you'd need to do to see any visible results and how long it takes.

Comment Spam 101
So, of course, I created a new account. I wouldn't be so dumb as to use my primary account. Right? Right, except I wasn't thinking like someone trying to think like a comment spammer.

Of course comment spammers are going to create multiple accounts; and of course (of course!) the people running hugely successful and popular web sites like Engadget know when someone is trying to subvert their system by creating fake accounts.

Anyway, I created a new account. So far, still fine.

But then I posted a comment with a link, which was identified as comment spam. Okay, no big loss, right?

Getting Caught
But wait!! They replaced my posting with a new message that read "I am a comment spammer" and then it listed my name and email address. And not the name and email address I used to create the fake account -- no, they used my original (real) info. They did this by matching the IP addresses of the computer being used to create the accounts.

And there's more. They didn't just replace that one post. They replaced all my previous posts so that they now read "I am a comment spammer. Melanie Phung is a spammer" even though the original posts weren't spammy.

There was one thread I had contributed several comments to, so this message appeared multiple times on that page. That was enough to make this particular page rank well for a query on the phrase "Melanie Phung." For a very brief while the Engadget page actually ranked #1 for a search on my name in Google.

As an online marketer that's not really good PR, so eventually I'm going to have to try and make that go away. In the mean time I could try to ask Engadget very nicely to remove the post [ed. because the same IP address is shared by my entire office; so I'm going to guess the same thing happens whenever someone else creates an account and posts from work.] But I'm actually going to just leave it alone for now; it serves as a nice reminder to myself not to make such rookie mistakes.

The Moral of the Story
To reiterate a theme I've promoted before: if you don't know what you're doing, stay away from dumb black hat tricks. I'm not saying it can't work, but unless you already know a little something about how a site operates and who it shares info with, you could just end up looking like a moron.

p.s. Also be aware that many forums and blogs automatically apply the rel=nofollow tag to all comments, so the odds are slim that comment spamming on a popular blog is going to gain you any PageRank even if the post isn't removed.

Second theme: Write good content and give people legitimate reasons to link to your site on their own. That way you won't need to resort to comment spamming and you can save yourself this particular headache.

Digg it yet?

Labels: navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung