Monday, January 29, 2007

Spammers Are Better Crawlers Than Google?

As I mentioned in a previous posting (comment spammers) there is an ever increasing trend of comment spam by automated system. The game forum got hit, which sort of makes sense. It is on a highly used forum platform, on a site with a decent page rank and gets a fair amount of activity per day.

It took me a while to find it on our site because it wasn't in a highly used section, in fact, it seemed the that it was specifically targeted toward older pages that wouldn't get as much attention. That's good for the spammers for a couple reason. First, it takes it longer to get noticed. Second, the pages that were around longer are more likely to have links to them, which also helps the value of the spammer's links.

I was much more suprised to see comment spam show up on my blog. Granted, I hadn't enabled the simple, yet annoying, CAPTCHA that Blogger provides. I figured that my site doesn't have any page rank whatsoever (I can't find a single link to it in the Google index), so what are the odds of anyone targeting it? Apparently the spammers are in some ways better at crawling than Google is, because they found the links (which are smattered about the web). I can't really imagine any other way that their system found my blog except a voluntary submission. While that is not out of the realm of probability, I haven't found a "spam your enemies forum with my links" website come up in any conversations on the subject.

Anyway, sorry for having to turn on the CAPTCHA, even though the comments are few and far between.

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