Why spammers hit blogs

This piece appeared in the Independent today, explaining why spammers post their ads on blogs – merely to push their ratings up on Google and other search engines which list sites according to people linking them:

Take my own as a typical example. The first post was on Wednesday 7 July. The first comment came on a post made two days later. The first attempted spam came on 20 July, attempting to “comment” on an old post. The content was junk – multiple links to a site selling cigars, US visas, and an online flower shop. It came from a broadband PC in Israel, one I’m sure had been taken over by a hacker and hired out to a spammer to run a program that would post spam onto blogs.

… What’s more interesting is why spammers want to post irrelevant rubbish onto blogs, even to posts that are no longer visible. They have two reasons, both to do with search engines. Google treats blogs as more important than “normal” websites, because blog content changes so much more quickly. A blog might have new posts perhaps a dozen times a day, with fresh links to websites that had previously been overlooked. So the “Googlebot” (the software program that sniffs around the Web to see where links are being made) often returns to blogs. Secondly, the Googlebot looks for changed information on the website; even though a comment might have been made on a post that nobody is reading, the webserver tells the Google index that something has happened there, and Google adds the comment and its associated links to the index.

Result, for the spammer: an unprotected blog is a splendid way to promote yourself in Google’s index to push pointless (but profitable) pursuits such as online poker or “dieting” drugs.