Have You Ever Wished Spammers Would Get Smarter?

I’ve had the odd thought lately, that I really wish spammers would start getting smarter about their marketing.

I have hundreds of spam comments hit this blog daily (27,500 or so since the blog was launched). They’re all the same technique. Do a search on specific keywords, leave a spam comment on posts with that keyword, and the comment is always just keywords with links. They’re probably using something like Trackback Submitter, or whatever the current version of it is called (and just using the name of the software in this post is nearly guaranteed to make it a target for spam comments).

I’d be embarrassed to run an advertising campaign that way.

I mean seriously, they have no idea how effective any particular post is. Granted, they’re trying for SEO benefit primarily, so they cannot use any link redirection to track traffic through the link. But that’s okay, because they don’t want traffic, they want higher positions in search engine results.

But if I were designing the software these people are using, I’d put in some monitoring portion that would track whether the comments were getting through, and if so how long they lasted before being deleted. After all, you don’t get SEO benefit from links that either don’t appear, or only last for a few days before being deleted.

That sort of feedback would allow spammers to focus their energies on the sites that provide them with benefit, and to leave my site alone.

So, yeah, sometimes I wish spammers would get just a bit smarter.