Blog comment spam getting weirder and weirder

I've been thinking about ditching blogger and getting some webspace at Dreamhost or some other place and just running a moveable type blog from there, since blogger is being a pain in the ass of late, with connection time-outs and the like.

But the nice thing about blogger is that it doesn't seem to attract any comment spam. And the comment spammers are getting just as innovative as email spammers in their attempts to weave around content filters, such as Moveable Type's mt-blacklist module.

I just found this example at NY Times columnist Adam Nagourney's blog:

1. The man who gets angry at the right things and with the right people, and in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time, is commended. by texas holdem

   Comment by free online poker — 2/6/2005 @ 10:54 am

The comment is just taking snippets of quotes and pasting them in blocks to make it look like a human wrote it. The content isn't trying to sell anything.

The point of blog comment spam isn't so much to attract clicks as it is to fool Google into thinking that that page is linking to the site spreading the spam, so that its PageRank will increase. (I erased the links when I pasted the comment here.) Clever and a pain in the ass because old blog pages that don't attract any attention from humans are still crawled by Google.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Spam