Max Payne Blog Spam: Investigative Report
Monday, October 20th, 2008Interesting.
A ‘movie fan’ posted a comment to my Awesome Max Payne Review. I was suspicious, because, let’s be honest here, this blog isn’t exactly high-caliber reading material, despite the eloquence of that particular review.
I searched for his comment in good ol’ google, and it looks like the same text, “i suspect the storyline for Max Payne is a lot more exciting when it’s happening in the form of a video game…“, has been posted everywhere else, with minor variations.
Looking at movie fan’s link, Kingdom of God Media, and the typical motivation for blog spam simply isn’t there: there is no money to be made.
- There are no ads.
- He has a donate link, but I have difficulty imagining that gets much action.
- He does link to an Amazon.com page selling a book he wrote, but that’s only on his other blog, Books By Patrick.
And, true to its tag line, “The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Revealed Through Movies, Music and Television”, it does interpret movies, music, and television with a religious frame, but not a ‘convert the heathens’ frame.
So, why? Why, Mr. Patrick Roberts, why do you post the same comment everywhere? It is not a bad comment, sure, but what do you have to gain from it?
By process of elimination, or perhaps by process of lack of imagination, I’m only left with ‘self promotion’. At the very bottom of his blog, there are several links to ‘blogtoplist’, ‘blogtoparea’, and other such blog-ranking web sites. By posting the same comment to multiple web sites, he is probably google-bombing his blog to a higher ranking.
And, because of the very minor variations in the comment, and the fact that my anti-spam filter did not flag it, I am under the assumption that he went to each site and posted the comments himself, without the aid of a spam bot.
So, I wondered how he found my eloquent review. While my review is perhaps the lowest ranked item in a standard Google Search, it is in the first few dozen hits for Google Blog Search.
