I’m not spamming your blog comments!

confused-panda-303949_640It has come to my attention that there is a new website in town that happens to have a URL extremely similar to mine. Literally one character different. The domain in question was registered on 3rd November 2015.

Let me first say, the site in question does not contain any of my content (*see update*) and as far as I know is not doing anything wrong from a content perspective. The reason I am writing this post is to protect myself.

It has come to my attention the owner of this site is spamming links to his site in the comments of other bloggers. It’s your typical link spam stuff, seldom any relevance to the original article, and just trying to get attention. Why do I care? In some cases these spam comments are obviously nothing to do with me, because they are posted under this guys own name. In others, it is very easy to mistakenly believe it is me spamming links to my site, because the URL is so darn similar. In fact, when it was first pointed out to me, I didn’t even notice they weren’t links to my site. My brain just auto-corrected it. 🙂

I just want to make it very clear, if you see spam links in your blog comments or forum answers that at first glance seem to point to “oracle-base.com”, please double check the URL before you get pissed off with me. It is not me posting this stuff. They are not links to my website. I’m gaining nothing out of this, but potential bad feeling from other bloggers!

To the individual in question, I have a few words of advice.

  • Spamming links to your website from other people’s blog comments really doesn’t do much to publicise your content. Most CMS tools, like WordPress, give external links in the comments section a NOFOLLOW value. As a result, those links don’t get followed by the search engine spiders and don’t help with your search ranking. You are literally wasting your time.
  • Content producers get really annoyed by spam comments. The more you do this, the more you get a reputation of being a dick. I wrote this post because I don’t want people to mistakenly blame me, for what you are doing.
  • Choosing a URL so similar to someone else’s is either a really lazy move, or a cynical attempt to piggy-back on their reputation. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on you as an individual. It’s cool that you are producing content in the community to help others and gain some profile. I just don’t see how the URL you chose to use will be viewed in a positive light by anyone.
  • Once someone knows the domain, a couple of Google searches and it becomes obvious who you are, that you already have an existing blog. I would suggest the content you are producing would be better posted to that blog. You are obviously fairly new to the content production game, so building a reputation associated with your name seems like a much better idea from a career perspective. My website is very well know, but in comparison I am not. That is kind-of the opposite of what most people want when they are trying to build a profile to help with their career.

If you are one of the bloggers I’ve contacted about this link spam, I would prefer it if you don’t mention the domain in question. At this point I think the individual is just misguided, so I don’t want this to become a witch hunt.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I have found one of my articles on the site. I wrote to the owner of this website and ask for it to be removed. I’ve heard nothing back, so I’ve filed a DMCA take down notice.

Cunning way to thwart spammers…

I wrote the other day about the level of spam I was having on my forum. I did a little playing about and all seemed to calm down. In fact the forum got very quiet indeed. It was quite pleasant not having to worry about it.

Anyway, today I got a little suspicious as I had no posts at all. I tried to write a post myself and got a server error. It seems the last switch I flicked on the control panel tried to do something my hosting provider doesn’t allow and blocked all posts.

So my cunning plan turned out to be not so cunning afterall… 🙁

Let’s see if the deluge starts again…

Cheers

Tim…

Spam: The ups and downs…

Managing spam forum posts, blog comments and website comments drives me to distraction at times. Having said that it sometimes has its up side.

This morning, whilst clearing a bunch of spam posts and comments I threw my toys out of the pram and declared to everyone present (nobody was in the room with me) that I’m through with the internet and I’m turning everything off. Fast forward a few hours and a couple of new spam comments arrive, both of which were relevant to the threads they were posted on and almost seemed useful and mildly insightful. In fact, the only thing that distinguished them as spam was the posters URL. One was a dieting site and one was a heamaroid treatment. The latter made me giggle (yes, I am that puerile) so I will not divorce the internet quite yet.

Cheers

Tim…