en.grand-pianos.org – follow up thoughts on spam

An insight into someone else's crushingly dull existence

So I blogged about en.grand-pianos.org trying to spam my blog 3 or 4 times every day. Turns out I’m not the only one who’s noticed them trying it. And if you search on Google, it turns out that loads of less forgiving or spam conscious webmasters have been letting them through.

For spammers who operate at this end of the pitch, this is kind of the game they’re in. A number crunching exercise in which they submit a few thousand “comments” every day in the hope that a few slip through the net and ultimately result in a few hundred backlinks. Most will have no-followed links, but the odd one won’t and over time they get authority and ultimately rankings.

In theory, anyway. Personally I’m pretty sure that Google will be able to spot what they’re doing.

Anyway, having posted about it – imagine my surprise when the guy came back and commented on that post with a cheery “fuck you too”. Now what’s truly laughable about this is that it shows that they’re not using a train script or anything to do the spamming for them. Some real, human man is actually going out, finding blogs and copying and pasting his crappy spam and then checking out what links he’s got out of the exercise.

I’m a musician – I’ve got a shedload of posts about music on here: gigs I’ve played, thoughts on songwriting, what it’s like forming a band. In the time it took him to paste his spam into the comment box (with his tongue sticking ever so slightly out of the side of his mouth) he could have actually made a contribution, got a perfectly legitimate link out of my site and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

I don’t imagine I’ll ever rank for the domain name, but that’s the kind of danger this dumbcluck is playing with. How many pianos would he sell if the people who typed his domain name into Google – still a very high proportion of people – ended up reading this alongside his website?