Comment Spam

We’ve been having a bit of a problem with spam in the comments recently. It all seems to have started with the following Google search.

inurl:blog “post a comment” –blogspot canvas

So I’ve been puzzling about what their intent was.

The first bit is obvious. They’re searching for sites which have the word blog in the URL.

The second bit is also obvious. They’re looking for pages which have the string “post a comment”.

Combining those two will do a pretty good job of getting you a list of blog pages with a “post a comment” button. Then it is pretty easy to write a script which will “press” the button and upload your spam.

But then things get interesting. The next bit says to exclude pages with the word blogspot. Blogspot is the domain which Google uses to host the blogger blogs. My first guess would have been that the blogger blogs have some sort of captcha on their comment system which these bad guys can’t get around. The problem with that theory is that our blog is actually hosted on the blogspot servers. So what’s up with that?

Then there’s the last bit. Why canvas? I  can see the page that this led them to, but what do you think they were after. I can’t think what their intent was. Any guesses?

BTW, did you know that the owners of a website can see things like the search term which led you to their page? There’s a surprising amount of information available using tools like Google Analytics. You might be surprised how much of a trail you leave when you surf the net.