Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Those Sneaky Spammers



Spammers are getting ever sneakier with their attempts to build page rank for their prn sites. Here's a lovely trick I discovered today, thought I would give you all a heads up on this so you can recognize it on your own blog.

The following comment was left on a Toad in the Hole entry on my site:


I long did not do(make) " Toad in the hole " as has overlooked(forgotten) as to do(make) the first recipe. Now I know, already did(made) also to me it is pleasant... And in general I adore is tasty to prepare.

The question to the author is possible? Which flour(torment) it is necessary (you see from it the taste depends) and what else it is possible to use sausages?


The warning to me was that the email address given was a .ru account. I've never encountered a single legitimate email or comment from a .ru account. The URL given was www.eaglepasslite.com. The website looks perfectly boring, but legit. However, if you do a "view source" from the browser, what is revealed is a lot of hidden text, all links to prn sites.

The lesson? Check the websites of your commenters. If they look completely benign, they just may not be.

And, if you care about the Google page rank of your own site, be extra vigilant, as Google will penalize your site if it links to known spam pages.


This post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes


4 comments:

Tana Butler said...

I have had to e-mail a few people who left odd comments on my blog, to clarify or query. Without fail, the questionable ones were from people who had plugged in some cursory mention of something on my blog just so their website would get listed.

I'm onto 'em!

: D

Rachael Narins said...

Wow, crazy stuff!

Now, what is ones google page rank? How do you find out what it is?

MizD said...

Wacky! That's like randomly generated text based on the content of your post. (That, or bablefish on an extra-bad day.)

I've not gotten anything quite like that, but the online poker spammers seem to have my number right now, to the point where I've had to shut down comments on almost all of my old posts. Scummy bastards.

Elise said...

Hi Rachael,
Google page rank is the algorithm Google uses to determine which websites show up the highest when a search is done on Google. Many things contribute to page rank, the biggest factor being in-bound links to the page. More is explained here: http://www.markhorrell.com/seo/pagerank.shtml.

To find out the page rank for your pages, you can use the FireFox browser with the free Google Toolbar installed. You'll see the page rank for the page you are on in the toolbar. You can also check using the Page Rank Checker.