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« TiVo opens up | Main | Oracle launches full frontal assault against SAP »

Spammers laugh at Google's comment spam trap

At least one spammer isn't impressed with Google's latest comment spam killing initiative.

"It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming," a UK comment spammer told The Register.

The anonymous interviewee leaves links to porn, gambling or pill-selling websites in the comments on weblogs. Search engines follow those links and rank the porn selling pages high in their results.

Contrary to email spammers, comment spammers don't cause much harm. They don't fool people into clicking on their links in a way email spammers try people to open up malicious emails. A comment spammer who does a good job, gets a high ranking when websurfers look for porn or Viagra or whatever. They attract web users who are interested in those products to begin with. If anyone is harmed, it is the search engine that is having its page ranking algorithms abused.

Comment spam nonetheless is surrounded by the same stale smell that typifies the email kind. And since they are spamming their ways up a search engine's results, comment spamming looks an awful lot like cheating.

February 1, 2005 at 05:24 AM | Permalink

Comments

My current research involves this subject. I have excellent perspectives on the future of the search machines as the computational intelligence that as much we waited.

Posted-by: Jeancarlo Campos | 20 Oct 2005 02:01:28

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