The blog spammers continue to get more clever in their attempts to bump up the Google PageRank of their sites.
Most comment spam is not designed to get people to go to their sites per se, but to increase the references to those sites in Google’s indices, thus making them more prominent in Google searches. Google awards PageRank based on links to pages — and on the PageRank of the linking pages as well.
That latter is a key to the new scam. Blog spammers are now not only putting spam in blogs, they’re then creating sham comments/links to those blogs in other blogs, in order to boost the PR of those (spammed) blogs, thus boosting the PR of their spam.
So, for example, spammers discover that Joe-Bob never cleans comment spam from his blog. Not only do they then fill it with comment spam (with links to their hives of scum and villainy), but then go to other legit (ideally high-traffic) blogs and put comments with links to Joe-Bob’s blog.
The owners of those legit blogs see the comments, but recognize that Joe-Bob isn’t selling enlargement devices and think the comment is thus legit, thereby lending their own PR to Joe-Bob’s blog, and thus to the comment spam.
“Fiendishly clever.”
The result, as Jay Allen notes, is inevitable: the MT-Blacklist is going to start carrying blogs in it, sites that are not, themselves, comment spammers, but who (shades of Middle-Eastern geopolitics) lend shelter and support to spammers by not actively cleaning out their nests. Thus, Joe-Bob might suddenly find that MT-Blacklist-protected sites will no longer allow comments that link back to his blog, until such time as it gets cleaned out and de-blacklisted.
In the spam wars, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem …
Spammers Get Creative …again
Never a dull moment in the war against spam. The proliferation of anti-spam techniques such as MT-Blacklist (in use on this domain) have dealt a solid blow to spammers who tirelessly come up with new methods to increase their search…