I’ve been learning a lot about spam on blogs these past few weeks. . . because I’ve been receiving a lot. (Ah, nothing like experience for learning a bit about how to avoid spam and how to clean it out of posts and comments!)

Here’s my take-away for today:  by using typos in comments, spammers can determine which blogs have a low filtering threshold or which automatically approve comments (so I just turned off the auto-approve, which means I’ll read and approve a comment before it appears on this site).

Spammers have an effective modus operandi.   They’ll send an automated and innocent-sounding comment with distinctive typos.  Then the spammers do Google searches for their typo comments.  (I just did a Google search for one of the comments I used in “Spiffy Spam”  and found 718,000 hits!)  The websites that approved the comments are then targeted with another round of spam, but these comments are malicious.

Even though I knew the comments were spam (and deleted them),  by posting all those comments in “Spiffy Spam”, the spammers were able to find me in their Google search!  I wanted readers to still enjoy the post, so I went back through and corrected the typos, also adding asterisks, so my blog post wouldn’t turn up in spammers’ searches for their spam-typo comments.

NOTES:

• This blog is ad-free.  If you see any ads, please comment in the post where you found the advertisement.  Thanks so much!
• The fancy spam-meal photo can be found on Wikimedia Commons.