Razvan Antonescu

1. “Intelligent” comment spam

The classic, automated, blog spamming seems like is living it’s last days. This is basically the result of two factors:

• Stronger and better spam filters (read Akismet)
• Better informed blog owners

Because of those two factors a new spamming industry is on the rise and I think that’s here to stay. Human comment spam. This consists of companies that deliver medium quality comments in niche blogs for those interested in getting quick links. Lately, with no activity on this blog, I got a lot of those. My choice? Let it be. They provide unique content for the posts and might encourage genuine readers to interact. In the future? No ideea

2. The nofollow scare

Latest Google PR update has hit pretty bad on some of the SEO industry ego’s. What really surprised me were the denial reactions and later the cowardness. Search Engine Journal, if my memory is good, was one of the first and only SEO sites that removed the nofollow tag from their comments. A pretty brave and intelligent step, not because they were against Google’s rules but because they figured out the way to get more people interacting. Today, to my total dissapointment, I saw that they have added it again. I have no ideea when that happened but I bet that this came after they were downgraded by Google. I just hope that DaveN won’t do the same under Google’s pressure.

Note: I have removed the nofollow tag from this blog a while ago

3. Comment spamming protection fee

If I said previously that automated blog commenting is dying, for the Mafia it might not be true. Just look at the following (non-) spam comment I got:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This was beyond hilarious and this dickhead qualifies for sure for the Idiot of the Year Award.

P.S. It seems like the “Mafia” is pretty busy, a simple search for the idiot’d ICQ number returning 10.900 results. Or for the black hats 10.900 blogs with comment moderation turned off