Today I got a comment spam, nothing very unusal just the normal online poker thing. But what was odd, and novel, about it was that the two dozen or so links in the comment all had rel="nofollow" as part of the link code.
Hang on, I thought, isn’t nofollow supposed to be defeating comment spam? (It’s not intended to stop comment spam hitting your blog, at least not straight away, but it is intended to make comment spam less attractive to search engines thus eventually killing it off by reducing the ROI.)
So why would a spammer send out comment spam with nofollow already included?
It could be that the spammer in question is an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Nice thought but most spammers are actually quite smart. I know it doesn’t look like it when you receive a million penis/breast enlargement spams which (a) you don’t need anyway 😉 and (b) don’t apply to your half of the population, but they are playing the numbers game in a big, and profitable, way and they do know what they’re doing.
So maybe they’ve discovered that some blogs are letting comments through without moderation so long as they have rel="nofollow" on all links, coupled with search engines that don’t yet support this new “standard”.
Or maybe they’re just experimenting to see if the above case is true anywhere. Damn I hate my blog being used as a lab rat.
Any thoughts?
Okay, so you’re getting a comment on something over a year old, but I was browsing your spam category, ‘kay?
When you say “a million penis/breast enlargement scams which (a) you don’t need anyway”, are you trying to tell us you’re a big ladyboy?
Well you did say ANY thoughts…
No comment.