The first thing that came to mind was some kind of revenge system - but I then rejected it because I would rather move the web towards consensus than conflict. A generative, but long-term, solution might be to promote an XML standard by which metadata can be attached to links (is there one already?). In this case, you as blog-owner might retain control of these. You might then give this link a "-10" rank, say. A consistent and commonly-used system would be of great use to search engines, so I would expect them to adopt it quite quickly. It would probably be first adopted for inter-blog links, then extended as it became more popular.

→ Posted by: Ian at June 22, 2003 4:03 PM

My weblog is not popular, not even in the smallest of crowds, but lately, I have been receiving spam in the comments, especially for entries that mentioned certain products (a local brand of pizza, for example) and an entry in my philosophy category that played on the meaning of the word “shaving.” The comments for the latter post had to do with Gillette, and I deleted them. Obviously, some marketers sit there using Google as a “mailing list” resource for this new territory. I can see how this spatter of spamming on weblog comments could soon turn into a big problem for us all, so I am glad that you brought it up. I don’t have any ideas about how to deal with it, but I believe we should start thinking about ways to prevent it. A search engine ranking system, like the one proposed by the previous poster, would be a good start, it seems to me.

→ Posted by: maria at June 22, 2003 7:38 PM

Thank you for your wonderful site! Signed, Mr. http://taint.org/ .

Seriously though -- it is a good blog. ;)

Anyway -- I think the most important thing to do is write up a page documenting this behaviour, and make sure it links to the offending site and contains its URL prominently, and what they did, in a Google-friendly location, such as right at the top of the body in a H1 tag.

The aim is to get plenty of googlejuice going to your site, over theirs. That way, searchers for the site, company, or person will likely hit your page, or find it listed in the top 10 results -- and they've just given themselves the worst advertising they possibly could.

For example, earlier this year, I got spammed by Amanda Perez. Well, in reality it was her PR company I think. Out-and-out, spam-to-a-scraped-address spam. So I wrote up a blog posting and posted it, it got picked up by the googlebot, and for several months my "Amanda Perez is spamming scum" page was the top hit for her name on Google. Oops! ;)

Related is the wierd practice of referrer-log spamming, in an attempt to get googlejuice. It's very odd, using random throwaway domains, generated pages, etc. Very wierd. I got this on my blog a couple of months ago and wrote this up about it.

--j.

→ Posted by: Justin at June 22, 2003 11:47 PM

This post was funny. Sounds to me like the question is more than a bit rhetorical. Hence the link "e-flight.biz spends its time with unethical advertising and unsolicited spam". But you guys had some nice ideas anyway :)

→ Posted by: Andreas Reuterberg at June 23, 2003 9:00 AM

I am getting comment spamming too - not just automated stuff either, it sometimes seems to have been typed in by desperate humans. And the blog entries they target seem random - some are linked to entries months ago. I do hope I won't have to start running a spam-eating app on my weblog's comments!

→ Posted by: David Brake at June 23, 2003 10:32 AM

I've only had a couple of comment spams. Having very few comments anyway (I know, world's smallest violin), they always stick out like a sore thumb. However, as David mentions, they're always pretty randomly targetted on really old entries and have false email/domain addresses. If they weren't so blantantly full of teenage boredom, I may find them amusing. At least exercising my 'delete comment' finger keeps me in shape...

→ Posted by: s3d at June 23, 2003 11:07 AM

Send an email to google explaining this situation, they will probably ban the site or somesuch, thus negating all the *hard* work they've been doing.

→ Posted by: Ben at June 23, 2003 11:22 AM

I should point out that the link I put above about e-flight.biz being unethical spammers is not a Googlebomb. Google built in a nice piece of parsing code that means they won't weight the words in a link if they don't appear on the page at the other end. It was not intended to be, nor could be, an attempt to influence Google's listings. Having said that - if people wanted to link to this post under the name e-flight.biz, so that people who researched them were likely to get this complaint high up in their search results, I don't think I'd complain much!

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 23, 2003 11:25 AM

I've had a few spam comments in my guestbook. When I spot them, I delete them right away, but I've never really understood why they were there. My site doesn't get much traffic, so it seems a really time consuming thing to do, for not much payoff. At any rate, I found this interesting (at least now I know what the spammers are trying to do, and that I'm not they only person who gets these weird messages. Thanks for clearing up a bit of the mystery.

→ Posted by: sam at June 23, 2003 8:37 PM

The other day I saw a nigerian 419 spam as a comment in a band's weblog. I just looked and it has since been removed, but I thought it was a new low.

→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 23, 2003 9:45 PM

This is nothing new -- in fact, it's becoming a real nuisance. Ever since the "blogging" phenomenon started getting a lot of hype, the spam vultures have been swooping in for the kill. A lot of the above comments have a good point -- that it seems like a lot of time spent for very little result. On my site, I post technical tidbits on web development -- code snippets and such, just to have a little something besides the usual "bored teen" drivel to read. Well, I received a comment in my "geek" section from a fellow in England, saying something to the effect of "interesting and useful stuff here, need a few days to get my head around it all." Which I considered a compliment. Well, a few days later, I found in my referral page (more on this below), a barrage of referrals from a site in England I never heard of before. Now, on my site, I have a page dedicated to backlinking, or links to pages that link to mine. This is found on a lot of weblog sites, and it's a great way to help fellow bloggers promote one another, to trade googlejuice, so to speak. Well, when I visited this British site, I found a complete and utter mess of banner ads, semi-pornographic picture galleries, and literally dozens of links to "backlinking" pages, including mine. Now I may be wrong, but I concluded that the guy who I thought had left a nice compliment on my geek page was nothing more than another spammer with a lot of time on his hands.

→ Posted by: Jamie at June 23, 2003 11:19 PM

Although my comments system hasn't been effected my guestbooks is regularly spammed. I use a structure of many questions (favourite films, music, books, colour of couch) and you'd be surprised how many actually take the time to answer the questions before dropping of the spam URL or message. Boringly every spammers favourite film seems to be Star Wars. Part of the issue is that their no doubt working for a company and getting paid to do this work, might even have a quota they have to fulfill.

The real stinker was a spammer for a porn site. I noticed that s/he'd left a comment quite quickly and deleted it. But it returned a few minutes later (I knew because I get an email whenever someone leaves a comment). I deleted it. It came back. This went on for about ten minutes before he presumably got board. I mean what's the point? A waist of their time and mine.

→ Posted by: Stu at June 24, 2003 1:29 AM

I've just gotta laugh at the redundant title. Because, you know, we all love the ethical spammers...

→ Posted by: Dave S. at June 24, 2003 4:40 AM

I solve this problem with MT's "close comment thread" feature. Set comments to "closed" and they will show but no further comments will be accepted. Wish it could do auto-close comment threads after a specific time period.

→ Posted by: Mark at June 24, 2003 4:45 AM

I hesitate to suggest it, because it introduces a few unfortunate side-effects, but I don't immediately see another solution to the problem aside from placing a gate between the spam and the public comment page. For example, one might need to "approve" a comment before it gets posted on her site. This is a bummer solution admittedly, but there are also ways to create similar gates programmatically, and to allow trusted users through the gate (e.g., cookies, passwords, etc.) without hassle on subsequent visits, perhaps? (Man, I feel like a nerd.)

→ Posted by: Chris at June 24, 2003 6:04 AM

Tom said
>Google built in a nice piece of parsing code that means they >won't weight the words in a link if they don't appear on the >page at the other end.
That is not true. Or it does not work. My site has been no 1 for a certain keyword for about half a year. Last Google update I was passed by a new website which did not at all contain the keyword. When I searched for the links to it I only got guestbooks. He has spammed the guestbooks with links using several keywords.The guy has spammed over 100 guestbooks. Because of the new way Google treats the main page I have fallen from 556 to 46 on the index page while I have increased the number of links to more than 1.300 on the whole site. I hope Google soon discovers the problems they have made by ranking link words higher than titles. I am not going to spam this comment with the url but you can search for panoramas and look at the "zoomvirtual" page. I seen several examples on the same thing earlier but not from guestbooks.

→ Posted by: Hans Nyberg at June 24, 2003 10:43 AM

One possible idea might involve whipping up some sort of system similar to that of using dummy email accounts as a sort of honeypot, in order to automatically identify and block spamish comments. It'd clearly take someone with madder programming skillz than I to implement, but that's my idea. Run free, little idea!

→ Posted by: Aaron Mayzes at June 24, 2003 1:55 PM

Tom, you gave them one link. That's not enough for a Googlebomb. Thus it's one link to much ;-)

→ Posted by: Gerald at June 24, 2003 2:23 PM

If they were smart they could offer authors of popular blogs special deals. Doing so (even at a loss) would get them mentioned by the author themselves.

→ Posted by: Mark Davis at June 24, 2003 6:32 PM

Blogger should add a baynesian filter to their comment system. They could produce something pretty robust from the large number of blogs that they host. I currently code my own blog because I'm a dork like that, but a filter that leverages a larger community would definitely add value to a localized system like their's. Or, if this gets to be a major problem for a site that gets a lot of comments, MT could add a "this is spam" button that lets the administrator delete a post and add it to a local corpus. For awhile, the blogger would have to be prompted to review questionable posts, but folks who've been blogging for years would have a pretty bulletproof system by now.

→ Posted by: jay at June 24, 2003 6:56 PM

Hey Jay -- I'm a dork like that too!

→ Posted by: Jamie at June 24, 2003 7:17 PM

Joel of Joel on Software has an interesting answer to some of this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

→ Posted by: ryan at June 25, 2003 1:54 PM

I have been a serious victim of comment spam. There was a gap of a few weeks where I was away and not online, and I returned to my weblog to find a whole heap of comments on my weblog. The comments were in regards to a guy on the Internet who is scamming people by selling brand name sunglasses at a discount, and then not delivering. Now the comments on my site implied that I was this person who was scamming these people! So people searching for "ray ban scam" were hitting my site through Google, then finding my email address and sending me unpleasant emails. At first I thought it was a friend playing a joke (I have weird friends), but it got serious. I deleted all the comments, and shut down comments on my weblog, but the google cache took a while to update and still had "ray ban scam" referencing my site. I am still now seeing referrers in my logs of people looking into the scam and finding my site. A strange tale.

→ Posted by: Nik Cubrilovic at June 25, 2003 10:23 PM

I have to agree with you about this unethical spamming. I think that it is just stupid.

→ Posted by: Justin at August 25, 2003 11:59 PM

Just did a search for 'e-flights' on Google. This page is ranked 14 :)

→ Posted by: Robin at September 11, 2003 4:05 PM

As far as page rank goes aren't you like the pot calling the kettle black? Let's face it google has artificially super raised the page rank of blogs because they are in the blogger business now. Two years ago a site like your blog here would at best have a pr4 if you were lucky!

→ Posted by: Bob at September 22, 2003 6:50 PM

No, "Bob", I'm not. And why? Because unlike you and the four other people with similar one-word names littering my site this morning, I don't spam other sites to get pagerank. All I do is run a site on a daily basis that contains content that people are interested in linking to. How Google rates that is their own bloody business. And while I'm at it, I don't stick links to porn sites on other people's weblogs.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at September 22, 2003 10:32 PM

Tom,
If you don't want certain types of homepages listed such as ones about sex then you need to turn off allowing homepage url's to be listed with the comments. I don't know what your problem is with sex sites, perhaps you are a victorian or a religious fanatic, beats me, but you do have the option to turn off homepage url listing with the comments.

As for full names v/s a single name what difference does it make? I don't get it? Do you really think people who use two names are using their real names here on the internet where they could be hurt, killed by psychos out there? Do you ever read the newspapers concerning people who have given out their real names on the net and were kidnaped and brutally murdered by wierdos out there? Nobody with any common sense gives out their real name on the internet.

→ Posted by: Bob to Tom at October 5, 2003 6:32 PM

Seriously, Bob. What you're doing is the equivalent of walking into someone's conversation and shouting "Do you want a blowjob!? Come to my site and get a blowjob!" over and over again. I don't have any problem with sex. Sex is great! But you're not offending me on the basis of your interest in sex, you're offending me because you're prepared to fuck around with other people's conversations just to make a few cents. That kind of cynicism, that you're quite comfortable to come in here to my site that I pay for out of my own pocket and have built and written for on a daily basis for the last four years and dare to try and use it to scrabble for money without regard for me, the work I've put in or the community of people who use this site disgusts me! It's no better than petty vandalism and I have no respect for anyone who undertakes it.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at October 5, 2003 7:39 PM