I logged in to the blog today and saw more than 1200 comments waiting for approval. Since I post rather infrequently, I don’t use Akismet. Instead I have a word list that I add by default to any new WordPress installation and that works well.

However I don’t have nfl jerseys blocked and I guess the spambots picked up on a previous post where I mentioned the term in relation to the effectiveness of anchor text comment spam. Surprise surprise – everyone using Xrumer, scrapers and whatever the Blackhat community favors these days sent a massive deluge of links waiting for approval.

I guess this stuff must still work on some level, though recent algorithm updates have really dialed down the power of anchor text. Of course if you have a million links from auto-approve blogs, maybe that’s enough juice to get you to page one?

Spam is Valuable for Research

A lot of people look at spam with complete disdain but I think the particulars of spam can really give you a clue on tactics, hot industries and overall link building strategies for the dark side of the web. The interesting thing is that they can be effective … for a while anyway because algorithmic changes take years and often they still can’t get it right (cough duplicate content cough).