Aren’t You Talking to a Blog Spammer
Posted by Brian Kelly on May 5th, 2009
A recent comment submitted to this blog for the Twitter For Museums post asked:
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
The comment was trapped by the Akismet spam filter and required approval by a blog administrator. I would normally automatically delete such comments based on my judgment that any comments which could be made of any blog post is likely to be an automated posting. For example there was another comment which said “My friend on Facebook shared this link and I’m not dissapointed that I came here” – and this included a link in the author’d detail to a cigarette-selling Web site.
The sentence in the first example: “Interesting blog post” also provided an indication that this was a spam comment, aimed at getting readers to follow the link to the author’s Web site and hoping to enhance the findability of the Web site in Google and other search engines by creating lots of links to the site.
The Web site in question was a blog provided by a marketing consultant. But as original blog post was concerned with use of twitter for museums it could be argued that a question on “What would you say was the most important marketing factor?” could be a legitimate one to ask.
So I used Google to search for “Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?” – and found the identical phrase being used in a number of blog comments. I also discovered the Backtype service which can report on comments made by individuals are found a whole series of one line comments which have been submitted to a range of blogs. In contrast if use the same service to look for comments I have made on blogs you’ll find a diverse range of more thorough comments which are unlikely to have been generated automatically.
I have now deleted these two comments and flagged them as spam. And in case of anyone raising issues of censorship, I can point them to the blog’s policy which states that “Comments which are felt to be spam or are inappropriate will be deleted“.