New comment spam technique
Within minutes of my last blog post, I got notification of three trackbacks that didn’t get flagged by SpamKarma2 as spam. Each one had a somewhat spammy URL, and the last part was my subject line with “.php” appended. I went to one of them, and it was a blatant copy of my post, surrounded by their crap.
This is a disturbing new trend in the war between spammers and search engines - as well as getting a link from your site, they also copy your site’s content in order to get it indexed. Colour me annoyed.
August 4th, 2006 at 22:45 GMT
I wonder if you can get them for copyright violation on something like this?
August 4th, 2006 at 22:45 GMT
Oh, and I’m sure some creative Apache rules could sort this out.
August 4th, 2006 at 23:06 GMT
Gordon, regarding your “creative Apache rules”: it appears that each of the 4 trackback spam attempts came from different IPs, but each time, 7 seconds before the spam, there was a read of that page from 205.218.67.174. I’ve used iptables to block access from that particular IP. We’ll see if it helps.
August 5th, 2006 at 06:01 GMT
I had exactly the same thing happen to me recently - only the one copy though. I told Spam Karma 2 that it was a spammy trackback, I wonder how it will cope.
August 7th, 2006 at 14:53 GMT
I was actually thinking there might be a way to prevent your content from being wrapped up in someone else’s site. Once upon a time I saw a snippet for Javascript that would forcibly close a window if it was wrapped up by someone else.
September 30th, 2006 at 03:42 GMT
[...] Seems that I’ve become the subject of a new blog spam technique recently, similar to (or likely the same) as what Paul was experiencing a few weeks back. [...]