Is Your Blog Being Hijacked By Spammers? Here is how they do it.

I had an experience in the last two weeks of spammers suddenly taking interest in my blog, and posting a total of over 200+ spam messages on my blog. I originally wrote a post last week when I was trying to figure out how to combat them. In that post, I suggest going to your home page and simply selecting the comment from the list on that page and deleting them. What I discovered is that this only removes the message on your home page, but does not remove the spam comment from the blog post.

So I did further research on this spamming approach this past week while I was addressing it, and here is what I discovered to be their pattern. First they come across your blog, and discover they can leave a comment in the comment section. Their first comment is always a short sentence that may appear to be a legitimate comment, but it always contains exactly one grossly mis-spelled word.

Instead of the word 'Information' as in the sentence, 'This is some good information", they will use the mis-spelled version 'infomroatin'. For the word 'Helped' they will mis-spell it as 'hleepd'. This is done to give the appearance of someone just typing quickly and making a typing error. However this word serves as a tracer for them to find your blog again on the internet.

Try this simple experiment. Go to google and enter the mis-spelled version of 'Coming' they use: 'Coinmg' or the one they use for 'helped' as: 'hleepd'. You will find several mentions of this all over the internet, and they are usually words in other blog posts. That is why I call it a 'tracer' because it allows them to run a program to find your blog comment section again, and enter a new comment. (See the example above with the entry on Dec 18th, and then subsequent entries on each of the following days like a roaming program.  Same pattern each time.)

This next comment is usually a gobble of mis-matched letters. It also comes precisely the next day. Following immediately behind it is another comment posted with a link. This link is an attempt to install a hyperlink on your blog which will do two things.

1) Give them another point on the internet that someone might stumble upon their stupid link and arrive at their website or receive a spyware, virus or malware of whatever it is they are selling, which is usually drugs, porno or some scheme to rip someone off with identity theft.

2) Steal or hijack your google juice from your organic blog, and boost their organic website rating in doing so to repeat step #1.

They most likely have some sort of crawling program that locates and installs the tracers in the comments of blogs, and then moves into the second phase of installing the links. They are probably selling this service to someone as a method of boosting their ratings on google, or some other such scheme.  (See the example above of the entry on the 18th of Dec and on the 21st there are three more spam entries on the same day).

Anyway, I have included a few examples of screen shots taken from my blog over the past few weeks. Unfortunately the only effective method I have found is to go back through all of your old blog posts, and click the 'disable commenting' button on each one, and delete all their blog entries. Otherwise their tracers will keep sending them back, and they will keep posting, posting and posting on your blog. 

Going back through all your old blog entries can take some time. It took me three days to do this as I had over 400+ blog posts to go back through. However, I deleted all 200+ of their links, and shut them down by disabling commenting.  The downside is my friends on AR will not be able to comment on my past blog entires older than 15 days at this point, so there is a double edged sword with this approach.

It would be helpful of ActiveRain would include the feature to disable comments on blog posts after 30 days. Wordpress has this included in their settings as an option for the blogger, and I highly recommend it. They also have a feature to allow you to screen or approve outside comments. This is useful to kill the spammers. It allows you as the blog holder to edit the comments, so I go through and remove their links, correct their spelling and leave a nice comment from them on occasion just to spite them.

I hope this information is found to be useful. (Please note, if you have read this far, I hope you will understand why I will be disabling commenting on this post after about 15 days or so.  However, you are welcome to re-blog it and share it with others if you find it useful.)