Peter Galen Massey's Book Blog

Most bloggers are familiar with the evil spam bots that prowl the internet and leave spam comments on their sites.

One purpose of these evil bots is to build links back to the websites of the diabolical overlords controlling them because links help improve a site’s search result position in Google – or at least they did until Google’s recent Penguin update began punishing websites with lots of spammy links.

Penguin doesn’t seem to have slowed down the number of evil bots visiting my site and leaving spam comments yet, however. So every day, Akismet catches them and every day, I delete them.

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the evil spam bot comments.

Many of the spam bots seem to have been developed by programmers who write imperfect English or who perhaps suffer from some kind of language processing disorder. Which create delightful sentences.

Here are some of my favorites. This one is either an unsuccessful attempt to write code that tailors the comment to the material on the blog post. Or it’s the work of a surrealist genius:

Pinnock is repulsed by the Word of God and the in-browser online version of Typer Shark, the player controls a diver on his or her toes. There is also a huge selection of lawn mowers. This site does not have many options for about the site. And ensure he’s around for now.

This spam bot seems confused, but confused in a vaguely poetical sort of way:

You are my breathing in, I have few web logs and infrequently run out from post . “Never mistake motion for action.” by Ernest Hemingway.

I especially like this one:

I have study not one particular write-up on your weblog. You are a massive lad.

It’s true my lad is massive. But how can you tell that from my blog? I got this one soon after:

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Appreciate the offer. My massive lad is doing quite well without any pharmaceutical help, however. On to the next:

There’s noticeably a bundle to learn about this. I assume you made certain good points in options also.

The evil spam bot above seems to admit it hasn’t read the post. The honesty is refreshing. The honesty of this one is less so:

Thank you, I’ve just been looking for information about this topic for a while and yours is the greatest I’ve discovered till now. But, what in regards to the conclusion? Are you sure in regards to the supply? What i don’t understood is actually how you are no longer actually much more smartly-appreciated than you might be right now. You’re very intelligent.

Thank you. That’s more than I can say for you, oh evil spam bot.  Here’s another:

Hi there! This is kind of off topic but I need some guidance from an established blog. Is it hard to set up your own blog? I’m not very techincal [sic] but I can figure things out pretty fast. I’m thinking about setting up my own but I’m not sure where to start. Do you have any tips or suggestions? Many thanks

That one is pretty clever because you might mistake if for an actual person leaving an actual comment if there were any actual people who were named “buy discount cigarettes online” by their parents.  The last one:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. So what is good On-Page SEO? First your keyword must appear in the title.Then it must appear in the URL.You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….wait there’s even more Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you? That’s right AUTOMATICALLY, just watch this 4minute video for more information at

I get this one pretty often and the interesting thing about it is that the advice largely conforms to the on-page SEO recommendations you find on sites like Search Engine Land and SEOMoz. I tend to pay less attention to keyword density in my posts than some experts recommend because it clogs up my prose style, and I only use H headers, bolding, and italics when I think they make sense to a human reader.

Another interesting thing about this comment is that it says Google’s “Panda” update has made back links less effective for SEO. Generally, the “Penguin” update is considered to have punished spammy backlinks while “Panda” punished pages with thin content but a lot of on-page SEO – ie, exactly what this comment addresses.

Whether this is an example of an evil spam bot getting all “Manchurian Candidate” on our asses … a simple mistake … or a joke, I can’t tell.