Thursday, January 12, 2006

Too Many Dashes

Some spammer is really going nuts with comment spamming my blog. For the last four hours I have been getting the same comment spam over and over with only the link keywords changed. At this point, of the twenty-seven different posts Martyn has been spamming, most have two spams and many have three or more. I get a new one about once every minute for a while, then a break, then they start all over again.

Does this URL look non-spammy to anyone? I don't think I have ever seen that many dashes in one domain name:

diet-pills-phentermine-pill-buy-cheap-online.com

Not that their spam is hard to find in Google, but I thought I would provide a copy here:

Hi there, I was searching for information on the recent task force findings but seemed unsure of the status of HHS and DEA regulations addressing the very issues that they were reviewing, if you can shed any light on this please post at my blog. I see how I found your blog when I was searching for online discount pharmacy and online discount pharmacy related information, please remember to post at my blog if you feel you can add. Thanks for the read
Kind regards
Martin

Posted by martyn at 1/12/2006 04:34:23 PM


This is a marketing affiliate of Health Solutions Network (mpllc.net). Their affiliate terms have a "Zero Tolerance Spam Policy" which clearly includes all form of link spamming:

"Affiliate may NOT promote by means of Spam. For the purposes of this agreement 'Spam' is defined as one or more commercial or noncommercial unsolicited electronic messages."

I emailed mpllc.net after the first hour of the attack, but since it is late I doubt I will get a response till tomorrow morning. I will certainly let you know how it goes. Affiliates damaging people's sites like this make legitimate companies look bad. If you run an affiliate program, be very careful so you don't get a bad name yourself.

Update Jan 15: No response from mpllc.net yet, but the spamming did eventually stop. It continued until 6:12 AM the next day. That is over 10 hours of spamming the same blog with nearly identical comments. In the end there were 92 comment spams spread across 31 posts.

Update May 15: As you can see from the comment below, I finally got a response. Tony said he missed my email (or maybe it got filtered as spam). Either way, the affiliate account is gone now. He said they regularly search the web for affiliates who are breaking the rules. That's how he found my post. Now anybody directed to his order form from this spammer's account will see the message "Suspended for blog spamming."

Update July 10: Just a short following up. The spammer site still exists of course, but now is just a redirect to a spamdexing search site. The resulting site is at oingo.com, which is run by Applied Semantics, and now owned by Google. It is nice to see Google expanding its spamdexing business.

Comments:
Hi, I work for MPLLC.net. Your posting popped up in a google search. Contact me if you have a minute to discuss this.
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