Check Your Keywords: This Clever Query Warns of Comment Spam
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that every post on our classical music site HoldeKunst.com (that's German for "gracious art" or similar) was getting one comment, always to the same apparently Italian mp3 site. This blog, currently hosted on Squarespace, accepts comments without registration and posts comments immediately unless Squarespace's system gets suspicious and holds it for moderation.
At the same time I started noticing the following query in my keyword analytics:
site:.com inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "music"
The link takes you to the SERP on Google Indonesia. It's pretty clear from most the query that the searcher was looking for blogs about music, to make the comments appear relevant to our site. By subracting "comments closed" and "you must be logged in," s/he filtered the search for blogs with comments open to unregistered users.
The following comment is typical: a vague mention of music to appear legit and slip by Squarespace, but without engaging the topic at hand (in this case, Bartok's first two piano concertos).
Old music is like a treasure of the olden times which is priceless.
mp3melhor (link removed)
This isn't that bad. It's not a special quality-of-life-enhancing medicine. The wording is perfectly polite. But every post was getting one such comment, with a link to this one website -- and with a different username every day. Clearly it's the same person trying to be sneaky. I'm willing to let some of this slide, but it can be annoying when a comment is just so obviously not real. Take a look at this one, on a post announcing my husband's upcoming music classes:
Well I can says that all sounds great my kids will be going for sure!
(linked to a musical instrument affiliate marketing website)
The classes, at the University of Chicago extension program, are for adults, and are generally given on weekday mornings when the "kids" will be in school. They cover the very kid-friendly topics of Grand Opera, Romantic Piano, and Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik). The kids can learn all about Holocaust-era musicians who suffered career setbacks, forced exile, and/or imprisonment in concentration camps. Some went all the way to the gas chambers, including a group of children who performed in Theresienstadt.
But I digress.
I have various options for dealing with spam, and what I choose right now is to leave them unmoderated. I subscribe to the comments RSS, which allows me to see every comment without having to log in and moderate. We don't have numerous comments, but the few enthusiastic commenters is skewed toward an older demographic and some have reported confusion with various anti-spam measures. (That's another story, for the user experience files.)
I don't rush to remove these comments. I do do at my convenience because, ironically, Squarespace nofollows these links.
So my tip for today is that if you want to leave your comments open, be alert to queries like "-you must be logged in" in your keyword reports.
