Contextual Comment Spam

The blogosphere would be interested in this. I think I’ve received a web 2.0 comment spam. (Which I have unfortunately deleted)

This one posts a relevant comment scraped from another blog about the same topic (in my case Kathy Sierra’s post about being harrassed online). The name of the poster is in Chinese 发电机(meaning electric generators and then backlines to a manufacturer’s site). The comment is entirely on-topic. In fact I had to Google for it to find it actually a fragment of comment from some one else’s blog.

How do they do this? In my mind, it’s not particularly hard to find relevant posts, since memeorandum has already grouped them together, and for people who don’t speak Mandarin, it looks like a three character Mandarin name. Services which posts relevant spam to your blog is not necessarily bad though. Google might crawl your site more regularly, seeing that it has activity. The downside is that the links might point to junky sites. However, this is against the spammer’s interest. They’re better off pointing to a faux blog on their website, that might then be used to pass link juice to the target.