Pollution spamrun
Update September 4:
The spammer is still at it. I’m getting brand new comments today.
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I got a slew of comments spamvertizing a post from Cosmicbuddha along with two other blog posts.
I checked it out with Sam Spade, and caught this sentence:
NOTE FROM SITE OWNER: It has come to my attention that the link to this page has recently been included in several blog spams. I am in no way related to the spammer and have no idea why he is including my link in his spam. I do apologize for any inconvenience it has caused you. For backgound info on this situation, please see the comments to this post, below.
I noticed that the commenters hadn’t figured out who the spammer was, so I thought I’d mine my log for any hints of who he is.
He’s using different user agents:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Mozilla/4.78 (TuringOS; Turing Machine; 0.0) - this happens when he’s using anonymizer.com
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1)
The IP numbers are all over the place. Typical open proxies.
The commenters have already speculated on why:
Polluting automatic blacklists
Make automatic blacklisting bots unusable
Use for seeding blogs. Wherever the links stay, the blog is not well moderated
Personal attacks
Google bowling - drowning out specific search terms so previously ranking sites no longer rank.
I did find previous spams with similar wording and anchor text, for different domains. Including pcmcourseware.com and drneils.com.au. The question is if the spammer was working for or against those sites. Not sure. They’re not too spammy looking, though.
fish4less.net was also spamvertized. It does look spammy, but they’ve also used Google adwords extensively.
I don’t know. Any ideas?
September 3rd, 2005 at 5:43 pm
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&srch_type=0&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmicbuddha.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F001169.html
MSN shows 144 Backwareds inks
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmicbuddha.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F001169.html&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt
Yahoo Shows 38
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmicbuddha.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F001169.html&btnG=Google+Search
Google Shows 1
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BTW:
This is an interesting time to analyze the Link Popularity SERPs of the Majors and their frequency of Updates
It appears that Google has been asleep lately
Since Google Engineers read this Blog - what ALGO Fixes will they institute to prevent honest Webmasters from being Banned or “Demoted” for Google Bowls
of course, your Blog may help a few innocent victims get reinstated - but think of the many who will NOT have an advocate
and with Blog Linking software - the matter may get much worse
http://www.blog-power.com/
September 4th, 2005 at 2:49 am
Google doesn’t calculate backlinks that often. You should know that if you’re into SEO.
So it has nothing to do with being asleep. You need to do a different search to find out how many hits you’ll find in Google. Do NOT search for backlinks, but for occurring on the page. Two different animals…
September 4th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
One hour after the reply was written the BL update occurred
Two publically credited Backwards Links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmicbuddha.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F001169.html&btnG=Google+Search
The “occurring on the page” strategy although used sometimes for other purposes - has not been that dependable for Link analysis (of course, Google admitedly does not publically credit all links so the Link: strategy is also flawed)
Google HAS been asleep lately - not because of the sporadic BL updates - but because of the measurable and fast paced improvements in MSN and Yahoo (of course, they had A LOT of catching up to do - but at the rate they are going……)
September 5th, 2005 at 2:41 am
Hum, I read about it one of these days (not on my machine, otherwise I’d leave the link).
What they are doing/trying to do is link to posts they spammed, something like: “if I spammed this blog now, it is vulnerable and I’ll spam it again, so I better try and raise their PageRank by putting some links to it, so that my spamvertising links are more effective”.
September 6th, 2005 at 9:11 am
The trouble with these cases is that it’s hard to prove guilt.
A curious point, though - SpamHuntress, you’re using WordPress and it has an option to block open or insecure proxies - how well do you find that blocks these types of attacks?
September 6th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Eh, considering this is a honeypot, I don’t run any type of protection, except when I get fed up with a specific spammer…
September 17th, 2005 at 6:37 am
Under attack by a linkspammer
Updated. Someone is actively trying to ruin my online reputation. This might very well be because I’m the author of anti-blogspam software and because I post various articles and ideas on how to beat comment-spam, referrer-spam and trackback-spam. I h…
September 17th, 2005 at 7:53 am
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September 20th, 2005 at 3:52 am
I’ve been getting these odd spam messages as well. Fortunately most of them are getting held by moderation on MT black list but over the weekend I got 195 in one day (and my blog doesn’t get anywhere near that much traffic). It may be nothing but none of this started for me until someone “promoted” my blog on
http://dark-wr*a*ith.c*o*m/b*b*s/ [masked to prevent a link back from here]
Thoughts?