An open letter about spam to Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts is the man who deals with Spam at Google.
It is difficult to get in touch with him (or anyone at google) so I’m writing this blog with my question and will try to get his attention this way (I can send a link via twitter etc).
If anyone else has an answer, please let me know!
Hi Matt,
I have an awful amount of Spam hitting my site Spytunes.com, it comes in several different shapes and forms.
The usual blog comment spam is not a big problem, I get hundreds a day but most get caught in my spam filter, all other comments I manually approve so it doesn’t really bother me that much.
The main issue I have is with people who sign up and then spam from their profile.
I get about 10-20 of these per day, they are obviously looking for back links since there profile name is “Job Opportunities in Texas” and similar, nothing to do with guitar which is what I do.
It drowns the community and takes up a lot of my time to just mark these people as spammers.
Here’s the thing, pretty much all of them sign up with @gmail.com emails so my question is:
Is there a way to submit these emails to google as spammers?
Here’s what a typical spam email look like: j.akqga.brall.a.l.bek.ariw@gmail.com or ja.kqg.a.bra.llalbeka.r.i.w@gmail.com, they usually do a bunch at the same time.
Seems to me that if these got reported and it stopped paying off to spam like this, the spam online would become less of a problem, but maybe I’m wrong…
Anyway, hope you see this post and let me know.
Cheers
Dan Lundholm
spytunes.com
Considered using captcha when people register? I figure it’s just bots spamming….?
Yeah I’ve got that, they create groups as well so these are real people.
Why is it all gmail addresses? You’d think google would try to minimise this stuff, not make it easy!
Funnily enough it always happens during the week, never in holidays, if people only knew that this is what they pay for when they buy SEO services…
Found this btw, http://www.onextrapixel.com/2012/01/27/best-of-wordpress-anti-spam-plugins-and-why-you-need-none-to-fight-spam/
just to clarify, it’s not blog comments that is the problem, this is real people working with SEO, signing up and posting from their own profiles.
This gives them backlinks which helps in google search, as in, the more back links the better.
What I’m thinking is that if this type of behavior was actually bad for rank results then people would stop doing it.
Anyway, I shall keep trying to get Matt Cutts or someone of similar statue to give me an answer.
Or maybe I should just keep deleting these profiles everyday and get on with it…