I’ve written about blog spam before, a particularly underhanded and sleazy way of driving traffic to another website by flooding others with comments which contain backlinks or IP addresses.

The following chain of comments (unedited) appeared at various posts two days ago; it took me a minute or two to figure out what was going on, wondering if someone was really getting ad-based notices from my blog.

“you advise me to come to thjs site to unsubscribe, yet all i see are ads for your company which is wich you tell me”
“unsubscribe me thank you i am not interested”
“for the third time i an not interseted please do not send me any more blogs”
“not in the least bit interested, thank you”
“stop sendind me ads”

These all came on a single day within 6 minutes of each other, with a name (Salvatore Monda), an email address, and an IP address attached. It’s the IP address that provides the basis for raising search-engine rankings for spurious websites – aside from the fact that this tactic rarely works any longer, Google and others having factored it in to their search algorithms. Yet somehow, devious and stupid people keep trying.

I checked out the IP address – it appears to be defunct already, meaning someone has shut it down before anyone could be driven to it for whatever purposes – advertising, malware, who knows what. Akismet does a good job at filtering out most blog spam, but these look legitimate enough that they slipped through. Fortunately, I get to approve (or trash) comments at this blog before they go live – which I have done.

Salvatore Monda, this one’s for you.*

The Old Wolf has spoken.