dev|sushi

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam lately of the Rollyo query variety. Rollyo is a web property that offers user customizable search. You create yourself a list of trusted sites and then your search is restricted to those sites only. Over time you build a strong list of these trusted sites so that you never have to look at spam-y search results again. Additionally it has some social aspects where you can add another persons list to yours or search another’s list directly. I believe this is where we get into the source of this type of spam.

The stupidity of this particular blackhat SEO is apparent immediately because each comment is a wall of links in three formats: forum style URL tags ([url=http://link.com]link text[/url]) where the link text is “link”, flat text URLs and HTML anchor tags with actual keyword link text. Akismet has no trouble with them as it is extremely obvious spam. My site doesn’t generate a lot of traffic and so I get about 60 of these comments a week as a rough approximation. I’m assuming the low numbers are due to the spammer using a bot and spreading the “love” out across the blogosphere.

Today I decided to analyze the practice a little future to see what type of spam the spammer was trying to get me to look at on Rollyo. Maybe something in my content was triggering these attacks? Most likely it is bot driven but why not check it out. Looking through the keywords on a comment shows an extremely wide target, everything from porn to gambling and cars to wallpaper. I selected one very strange link with the text “polar golfer unlock code site” and clicked on the link. Immediately Rollyo informed me that I was being manipulated by a comment spammer and should I think otherwise to contact them. Wow! Good job Rollyo, keep up the good work.

I decided to try to circumvent the block. First, I cut out some weird parts of the URL so it looked more like a normal search. Nope, same thing. Next I tried searching for the term directly on the front page but the specified site didn’t rank in the first four pages. I was confronted with a multitude of other spam sites toting the weird keyword. Looking into a few couldn’t explain what was up so I decided to try going directly to the spam-y site. Bam! Immediate redirection to hardcore pornography. Ok, so now it is pretty obvious what the game is so let us move on to the mechanics.

Rollyo uses the Yahoo! search engine for the back end on which to search. You don’t need to be a member of the site to create searchrolls so I created one for my two blog sites. Check out all the parkour related posts on my blogs, how about asp.net related posts?. So it is that easy for a spammer to create a search result where they eliminate the competition. I’m curious if anybody has any further knowledge of these blackhat techniques they could share, it all just seems so stupid.