The perfect spam crime
The reCaptcha software seems to have done the trick – I no longer get 30 odd pieces of spam a day. Yesterday, however, I found myself targetted by the spammers again. This time someone left a wierd comment:
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
This doesn’t make much sense, so I followed the url of the author which is helpfully left on comments automatically. It turns out the comment was made by a site dedicated to news, gossip and news about Eddie Murphy. Hmmm. No real connections to EG…
So, I did what any clueless blogger would do: asked the IT crowd, or more specifically the SEO team. It turns out my blog post/content was ’scraped’, or nicked, by these Eddie Murphy oriented pranksters along with content from many other blogs. This means they have lots of free content containing those all-important ‘key words’ that people might search for, then on the side of their blog of blogs they put lots of Google ads – with the hope that someone will eventually click on one.
Canny types these spammers. There are two consolations: a) there was a link from their site to ecstaticgaucho.com which increases my all important search engine ranking b) apparently they only scrape content from sites/blogs that have a high enough search engine ranking… This threshold really must be quite low then.
Tags: , reCaptcha, scraping, Spam, stealing blog content