Tag: comments

Stupidest Spam of the Week Website Comments

Anyone with a web site will be used to receiving spam emails and also spam comments.

On WordPress, plugins such as Akismet do a good job at blocking most spam comments but some get through such as this one.

“My brother and I are lucky to have stumbled across the web page, it is absolutely specialized stuff my friend and I am constantly dreaming for. The information here on the website is truely needed and will help my family and friends twice a week or more. Appears as if everybody here learned tons ofunbelieveable of mastery pertaining to the things I am continually searching and other pages and info like wise shows it. I’m not usually on the web during the week but when my friends get a chance I am usually hoping for this type of knowledge or things similarly having to do with it. “

You can see that it’s all generic – designed to match as many web sites as possible, whereas genuine comments on a website are always specific as no-one takes the time to make a comment then essentially writes empty general purpose words.

The bad grammar and spelling is just an oddity.   Everyone has access to a spell checker so why leave in the mistakes?  The sentences do not make much sense – they appear to have been created by software.

Scammers buy software that takes one document and rearranges it into dozens of versions with the content sorted randomly. This is to try to fool the search engines into thinking it is genuine content rather than simply repeated stuff.

If you get comments on your web site or read comments on other websites – do apply simple logic and realise that often these things are written by software and many are just utter rubbish.

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Stupid Automated Comments

Anyone with a website that allows people to make comments, is likely to be familiar with comments appearing that make no sense.

May be these are from people struggling with a second language or maybe from idiots, but quite often they are from automated systems that churn out comments from sets of standard phrases and try to load them on websites against old blog posts, articles etc.

Why do they do this?

Mostly to try to get web links onto Internet sites – maybe to their own website or blog or to one they are being paid to get links for. People pay only a few dollars for hundreds of back links so it cannot be a careful process and the comments must be mass produced and automated.

Here’s a few examples from recent stupid comments.

  • It’s not my first time to pay a quick visit this web site, i am browsing this site dailly and get nice facts
    from here daily.
  • This slot game has 5 reels and a massive 20
  • I need to to thank you for this fantastic read!! I certainly loved every little bitof it. I’ve got you bookmarked to check out new things you pos
  • I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good.I do not know who you are but definitely you are going to a famous blogger if you are not already  Cheers!
  • I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up!I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back in the future. All the best
  • Hey there! Would you mind if I share your blog with my Facebookgroup? There’s a lot of folks that I think would really  appreciate your  Please let me know. Cheers

The comments are always against old posts as they know that Google will largely ignore comments against new blog posts so as to stop people over populating their own posts with comments.

The comments are anything the scammer thinks will be accepted. But never accept such comments or you may find your site is deluged by random meaningless comments and that will annoy any genuine readers.

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Website Comments and Pingbacks

“I truly love your website.. Excellent colors & theme. Did you build this amazing site yourself? Please reply back as I’m wanting to create my very own blog and would love to know where you got this from or exactly what the theme is called. Appreciate it!” by home and family crafts  at homeandfamily.eux

Now this sounds like an enthusiastic comment on my blog.

But it isn’t. It’s a computer generated random comment and instead of being added as a comment – it’s been added as a Pingback.

What are Pingbacks?

These are like making comments by remote.

The spammer makes an entry on their own website/blog etc. and adds a large number of links to pages she wants to advertise.   Each link goes to the comments section of a legitimate blog (or website) such as Fightback Ninja blog.

That registers a comment (pingback) on my blog and when I read it that counts as a page hit on the scammers website.

Scammers and spammers want high levels of traffic to their websites as they can then charge more to their own advertisers, but I don’t want pingbacks because they are always spam.

Pingbacks are automated and meaningless. If someone wants to make a legitimate comment, they would do so and not use a pingback.

Self Pingbacks

Self-pings (pings within your own blog) are found useful by some, annoying by others. Those who find them useful feel that if someone finds the old post that they will see the link to the new post. But some are unsure if this is a good idea or not.

Normally when you create a link, the entire URL including http:// is used. That will cause a self-ping.

To prevent self-pings, use a shortened url i.e. remove the http:// and the domain name

e.g. https://fightback.ninja/test/the-1000-gift-card-scam/ shortens to /the-1000-gift-card-scam/

Note: Your editor may add back the domain information so you need to check this.

How to Disable Pingbacks

In WordPress, go to Dashboard, settings, discussion and find the relevant box to untick.

You can also disable pingbacks on individual posts via the Discussion metabox on your Add New or Edit Post page:

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