Noisy intruders

After posting this entry about the YPN blog interviewing an SEO expert who spammed Randy Charles Morin, WordPress naturally pinged the YPN blog post, because I linked to it. Thus, I showed up in the comments section of that post, which prompted a comment from Chris Love:

Chip and you are not spamming this entry?????

No, Chris, I am not spamming. It’s called pingback. It’s a link to real content about the current subject under discussion. It’s not a link to a link farm page intended only to drive up page rank. Nor is it an unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Almost everyone these days knows what e-mail spam is, but apparently the definition of comment spam isn’t as widely understood. Those of you who are all too familiar with the latter may skip ahead.

Unlike e-mail spam, comment spammers generally don’t care whether you read or click on their comments. In fact, they often target your oldest blog entries in an attempt to remain unnoticed, because they figure you might remove them if you see them. Spam comments (or as I like to call them, “spomments”) aren’t meant for the reader. Their sole purpose is to fool search engines like Google that use links from blogs as an indicator of how authoritative a page is. If a spammer can populate the comments sections of hundreds of blogs with links to their site, then a search for any terms found on their pages will likely place them near the top of the search results. They use automated scripts to crawl the web, find comment areas, and post links to their pages. Sometimes their pages are in turn “link farms”, just a bunch of links out to other sites that pay the spammer to boost their rank. Because Google ranks the link farm page so high, the pages it links to also benefit from the “Google juice”, especially for the words used in the link. Being on the first page of Google results for an item you are selling means that you’re going to reach a ton of potential customers.

The one thing that e-mail spam and spomments have in common is this: they aren’t part of the conversation. In the case of e-mail, the spammer started talking without permission. Spomments, on the other hand, use the open mic of blog comments to yell out to the search engines. In both cases, they’re just adding to the noise level at our expense.