So I checked out the author link. Not totally spammy, really. The guy has some legitimate articles about blogging on there (assuming he didn’t scrape them from other sites). Then, three posts down, I see this post:

Comment Spamming? Really? Says Who?
December 7th, 2007 · No Comments

Recently, I have been reading about comment spamming. You know, where you go around various blogs and leave your comment just to get a link. And I don’t agree that it doesn’t work[....]

<snip>

Hmmmm. You backlink your blog to my site, and lead me right to a post about how you think spamming people’s comments is a good idea.

D00d, that’s got “Akismet submission” written all over it. Seeya.

Moron.

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One. Maybe somebody was just making a point?

I’m not surprised it got through. It’s a totally legit question relating to WordPress (though not very related to the specific post it was under…). The only “spammy” element is the commenter’s URL, which let to an extremely spammy site (update: err… and the fact that he commented to two different posts using different names — damnit). When I saw that, I did a quick Google Search of a sentence from the comment, and came up with a single hit: another blog that had three copies of the comment with different names attached. Yep. That would be spam then.

The funny bit is that the comment was a legit enough question that I do know the answer to, so I’ll be doing a post answering the question for anybody out there who actually might want to know.

The question was:

Just wondering if anyone could help. I did something stupid and started my blog using a numerical archive system, and now I’d like to change it so that the post title is part of the URL for SEO reasons. Is there any WordPress plugins that anyone knows of that could switch it without sending Googlers to invalid pages? Maybe some sort of redirector to the correct page?

Regarding the spam factor itself, I’m really not sure how one might combat this type of spam. Blacklisting, sure, but they just keep registering new domains and moving IPs. I do think that if they had tried to pound me with 100s of these, it would have tripped the sensors, so the good part is that it may only work with singleton comments instead of blitzes.

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