Is It Real, Or Is It SPAM?

I have written a few posts about illegitimate comments left on your website (Fake Blog Comments, as an example), the importance of removing them, why they are left, and how to identify them.

Those posts get a lot of hits from people coming to read about them. Invariably, I get asked questions about those ‘fake’ comments and will send folks to them to help educate them. The truth is, every blog will get spam comments left on posts and pages. The key, however, is NOT to let them become visible to the rest of the world and trash them before they become public.

Needless to say, I am not immune to these comments; most of the time I can tell that they are fake, but once in a while I get fooled. As a matter of fact, I was nearly fooled this morning so I decided to write about it. I figure that if *I* almost got faked out, it is no wonder that others can easily get mislead.

I went into one of my sites and saw the following comment:

This is such a great resource that you are providing and you give it away for free. I love seeing websites that understand the value of providing a quality resource for free.

Thank you very much and looking forward for more informative articles in the future. Bookmarked!

www.SomeparticularMeditationWebsite.com

(Note the website I wrote is just a placeholder for this person’s website – I am changing it so as NOT to promote the site).

My first thought was that this was a nice comment – a little generic, but many people write this sort of thing with specific comments on the content on my site. In addition, the post was about meditation so I thought it was relevant.

In the website field that gets filled out when submitting a comment, I noticed it was blank. So the comment was not BLATANT promotion for this person’s site, I deleted the site URL in the comment, and placed it in the website field:

I then approved the comment so everyone could see it and I replied to it as a comment as well (you should always reply to comments! – this is a great way to build rapport, by the way). As I was doing this, it was still bothering me that there was no comment specifically about the content of my post. Something was not feeling 100% right.

Here is what I decided. I started to write a letter to the commenter saying,

“Hi – thanks for the comment. I appreciate you taking the time to stop by the site and share your thoughts. However, please reply to my comment and answer the question I posed. If this is not done within 3 days, your comment will be removed.”

In my original reply, I asked what specifically did that person like about the content. I figured that this would be a good way to play it safe! I was giving the person the benefit of the doubt and I still wanted to be respectful.

Before I sent the email off, I had one last brainstorm – let me hit up my favorite Research Tool – Google 🙂 – and see if I could find anything. I searched for the entire first sentence (enclosed in quotes) and saw my answer immediately. Out of the 10 results on the first page, 9 of them had that exact same sentence listed. What does that mean? It means that this comment is not original and is being spammed all over the internet!

I went back to that comment and immediately deleted it. I also canceled the email I was writing.

When you encounter a comment that does not refer to something specific on your content, chances are that it is spam. When you are unsure, search your favorite search engine for an exact phrase in the comment – if you see it all over the web, delete the comment and move on.