Spam.
We all encounter it from time to time during our travels through cyberspace, and for the most part, we usually ignore it. However, there are those occasions in which not only do we pay attention to it, but we absolutely marvel on the ungodly amount of spam that a single item can attract.
For those of you who are new to this blog, the solitary reason why I don't allow anonymous comments is that I don't like spam. For five solid years, all of my blogs have been touched by the goddess of spam in one form or another, some more heavily than others. However, Memorial Day weekend 2013 was the last straw for anonymous commenting as I got nailed with a ratio of about 25 to 1 in spam comments versus regular comments (I totaled about 5 comments for that particular post).
Even though I eliminated anonymous commenting, I still get a lot spam page views, some more heavier than others. It really boggles my mind on why some of my blog posts get spammed into outer space. So just for ha-ha's, I thought I would share with all of you, my top 7 spam posts for all five of my blogs, and maybe, just maybe, you can figure out why these 7 have garnered so much attention from spammers.
7} Excerpt from my latest writing project: 213 page views (10/7/13). This post featured a small excerpt from the novella "It's Just Business" that I've been spending the past month or so rewriting. There's nothing overtly violent or sexual in the excerpt, just a short description of a party and a brief encounter between a man and a woman.
6} Newington's Annual Waterfall Festival IV: 214 page views (2/19/11). This was part 4 of a series about Newington's Waterfall Festival, which traditionally closes out the summer season in town. Just pictures with captions.
5} An Unfortunate Interruption: 227 page views (8/7/10). This was simply a brief post about my other computer crashing. This post also featured the winners of a "name the caption" contest that I decided to run.
4} B(ooks) A(lready) R(ead)*: 269 page views (11/19/13): Yes, believe it or not, this post is being severely spammed by a website from Germany. I mean, this blog is less than 2 1/2 weeks old, has less than 10 posts, and already has a post with the fourth highest page view total. Really?
3} Piggy Squealed In Rhythm: 450 page views (2/12/12). This post was basically about me doing my taxes and what kind of music I was listening to while I was editing my novel. The spamming on this post got to be so bad that I actually pulled it down (i.e. turned it to a draft) for several months.
2} All Points Bulletin: 836 page views (2/14/10). This post was one of my absolute best Valentine's Day free form flash fiction that I have ever written. Even had the actual flash posted in my publisher's blog, I was just that proud of it.
And finally, if you can believe it, this is the number one favorite spam post of all my blogs, and this one was written roughly 4 1/2 years ago.
1} Betrayed!: 1,236 page views (6/5/09). This was my second self publishing effort (the first was something that should've never been published, so I took it down) and I actually had fun with this thing, as I wrote almost a half dozen posts related to my journey of self-publication. Why this has garnered that many page views is simply beyond my comprehension.
*Since I wrote this post, that particular post garnered another 75 page views.
I have no idea I'm afraid, I just don't know how Spam works at all. I have loads of hits on old posts all the time, but no comments or links or spam are left, just hits on the post. It's got so bad I've had to remove my popular posts on my side bar as the ones that were becoming popular made no sense at all
ReplyDeleteJoe: I got the same here. I pulled these from my stats report on all my blogs that list the top 10 posts all time.
ReplyDeleteI've completely nuked about three posts that were getting monster sized spam hits.
Fortunately, we're two peas in a pod, in that we don't give spammers the ability to leave comments. Still, it is disheartening to see all of these page views are completely unrelated to people reading the blog.
Like you and LL Cool Joe, I have the weirdest posts that are "spam popular." I don't worry about it though because page views and stats don't matter to me at all. I don't allow anonymous comments either but that's to discourage trolls more than to deter spam.
ReplyDeleteI agree, mine tend to come from Russia, but that's all I know. Do yours leave links? I get nothing but the post and the country.
ReplyDeleteDebra: I used to have a problem with trolls early on, which is why I started moderating back in 2008. I got rid of them when I started spouting off details of where they were coming from, etc.
ReplyDeleteI give more weight to my stats counter than I do to the pageview count as it gives me a more accurate visitor count.
Joe: When I had anon commenting, they used to leave either a sales post or garbled verbiage, along with a link to the website in question.
I still get the rare spam comment, but that's mostly due to Blogger inadvertently classifying a comment as spam.
I'm with Joey - clueless on how spam works. Some people must open this shit, though, because it keeps ending up in my inbox.
ReplyDeleteM: Basically, what blog spam does is artificially inflate the page views as well as trying to get people to visit those spam websites.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't allow anonymous comments, it lessons the amount of spam that floods your inbox. Moderating w/o anon comments basically squashes it like a cockroach.