四海为家

I got a comment today on my post of a few days ago about the Chinese poem 关雎. The comment was from someone calling him/herself GlenStef, and just said “Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.”

My first thought: the poem is not true? Is that even possible — can poems be objectively true/not true? Second thought: this must be spam. So I googled this GlenStef character, and found a lot of postings on a very random mix of blogs. I also found this post from another blogger who had gotten the same comment on his blog as me, and who decided to do some more digging. From his blog:

1. Mister GlenStef has a lot of accounts in some extremely diverse blogs
2. Mister GlenStef has only a few things to say
   1. Greatings, Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
   2. yourSiteNameHere.com – da best. Keep it going!
   3. Hello, Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
   4. Everything dynamic and very positively! (even the smiley showed up in every place posted.)
   5. Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post. (Hey! that’s the one I got.)

   Looking at this next one, I don’t think it’s from the same spamming bot because I didn’t see it posted from GlenStef and it was more complex, but I did see it on several blogs when I was researching this:

   • I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
3. Mister GlenStef appears to have many pseudonyms:
   1. Elcoj – on several sites
   2. Streightepale
   3. Eremeeff
   4. AlexAxe (The site I got this one from was a veritable cornucopia of spam comments)
   5. etc. etc. etc…

All these are marks of a robot in action. Why go to the trouble of making all these posts? It’s a thing called search engine result placement. Most of these blogs include a link of some sort back to the commenter’s  “Home page” the more links to a URL you can get in the most number of diverse places, the more a search engine will view that link as relevant. All those links will (so the thought is) bump the URL up the Search Engine result list, putting more money in the spammers pocket.

So that’s how it works. Well, I marked the comment as spam, this character isn’t getting a website link out of me. Fellow blogger, thanks for your investigative work!