Proving Bad Intent
-
Okay, so based on common sense re: author name and generic comment...
...I'm pretty sure this blog comment awaiting approval is aimed at getting users to a phony site in hopes they will make a donation to a fraudster impersonating Johns Hopkins.
But if you check out the URL, you'll see they are not idiots. It's an .edu address with a high DA.
Two questions:
- Are my suspicions well founded?
- How would I go about proving this, in a less clear cut case?
Author : how to grow weed (IP: 173.208.91.231 , 173-208-91-231.ipvnow.com)
E-mail : Diekema@gmail.com
URL : http://apps.pathology.jhu.edu/blogs/pancreas/?p=121
Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/173.208.91.231
Comment:
After study a few of the blog posts on your website now, and I truly like your way of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark website list and will be checking back soon. Pls check out my web site as well and let me know what you think -
One thought is that it would add legitimacy to the comment, and get it approved. On some systems, the first comment needs to be manually approved, and after that the person can freely comment.
-
We all agree that the comment to my client's site is spam.
The issue is whether http://apps.pathology.jhu.edu/blogs/pancreas/?p=121 is also a spam site. I initially thought it might be sophisticated fraud: someone replicated actual content form an authentic Johns Hopkins site with the aim of raking in donations. But that doesn't explain the URL and seemingly legit links.
So I'm left wondering why the bad guy sent spam to my client's site, with an authentic site's URL. What was he hoping to achieve?
-
I don't believe that is the site being spammed. I believe the OP received a spam post on a different site, and the person posting the spam claimed that their URL was the JHU site.
-
That's wild. If it's spam, I'm not sure what's going on.
If you go the website that's being linked to, the site actually looks semi-legit.
I chased down a few of the links and the only external one I can find is to a guy who rides his bike to raise awareness of John Hopkins...and the "official" site has links from legit, personal blogs that are surely real.
And...the only outbound links appear on the ste appear to be completely legit to real places.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would someone be spamming this site? (Assuming they weren't trying to build the authority before they built their links...which really wouldn't be smart anyways.)
Just so I know I'm not losing my mind...we're talking about: http://apps.pathology.jhu.edu/blogs/pancreas/?p=121 right?
-
If you do a search on part of the comment, you'll see it duplicated all across the web https://blekko.com/ws/+%22study+a+few+of+the+blog+posts+on+your+website+now,+and+I+truly+like+your+way+of+blogging%22
so it is certainly a spam comment. The URL looks decently legit, but the email is a gmail address, certainly a spam author name, and comment is spam. Not sure that they're trying to defraud anyone regarding JHU, but it is certainly spam and I'd just delete it and go on.
-
Yes it is a spam site.
Google the email address and it pops up on several spam trackers.
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Diekema%40gmail.com
|
Date |
IP Address |
Username |
Email |
|
|
| 9-Mar-12 07:33 | 173.234.161.143 | Hai Tanzi | Diekema@gmail.com ||
|
| 14-Jan-12 03:32 | 200.222.13.135 | top 10 dubstep songs | Diekema@gmail.com ||
|
| 10-Jan-12 06:06 | 108.62.46.70 | decorator | Diekema@Gmail.com ||
|
| 30-Nov-11 04:28 | 173.234.248.159 | how to attract men | Diekema@gmail.com ||
|
<fieldset><legend>Legend</legend></fieldset>
|
| Toxic IP address or "bad" email domain |
| Highlighted | Hot IP or disposable email address |I just delete all comments that even smells of spam.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Would this be considered cloaking and would it be a bad move?
I posted this topic last night, http://moz.com/community/q/seo-dealing-with-a-cdn-on-a-site about issues I am having with a client's images falling out of index because they have a CDN now. So I have come up with a work around, but it might be considered cloaking and I am not sure. A month ago we changed over to using a CDN and the images started falling out of the index after that. Currently when you land on a page the images are served from cdn.site.com What I am thinking about doing is detecting Google Bot and when Google Bot crawls the site serve images from site.com. The images will be the exact same images as served from the CDN so it is not a content switcharoo thing. It is just to try to get the images back in the index. So would this be considered cloaking in your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
27 of 127 Domains Agreed to Remove Bad Links, Is this an Unusually Low Ratio?
Hi MOZ Community: I hired an SEO firm to run a link audit, identify bad links, request that those links be removed and upload a disavow file to Google Webmaster tools for the domains that would not agree to remove their links. My SEO company after emailing the owners of the bad domains linking to us obtained the following results: NYCOfficeSpaceLeader Total for Removal: 125 (118) Found: 87 (84) Removed: 27 (27) Only a total of 27 domains out of 87 found domains have been removed so far. Seven additional domains have asked for a link removal ransom which we are refusing. Only getting 27 removed seems really low. Is this normal? Is there any way to increase this number? Will the disavow file have any effect and if so when? If Google does not actually remove the links, how can I determine when the disavow file has been processed. I feel a little silly having paid a lot of money and the only tangible effect to date is that links from 27 domains have been removed. Has it been a worthwhile investment for only having links from 27 domains removed? My company does not have an unlimited marketing budget so obviously there is some concern. At the same time the SEO firm seems professional. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is a dynamic online user list bad for SEO?
Hello everyone, I have a question that is currently puzzling me, and I hope you can help me with. On musicianspage.com (one of our websites), we show a list of online users embedded within the page which, as you may expect, changes all the time according to who's online at that moment. That list appears on every page of the site, so at any time any page on the site has a different content and different link profile (sometimes we have just a few users connected, other times we may have over 50 users connected at the same time). My question is: is such a "dynamical-embedded" list bad, good or neutral from a SEO stand point? If it is bad, what do you suggest to do? Put it inside a frame? Using AJAX? Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome! Thanks in advance to anyone reading this. All the best, Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Pop Up Advertisement - Bad for SEO?
So i have been working with a company running their SEO for close to two years now. Since i started to engage with them they have always used a very simple pop up for the first time an end user visits their website (via javascript and cookies). The pop up simply ask them if they would like to download a solutions brochure from their website. So as far as pop ups go, it is at least relevant. The client loves this pop up, i do not. For a while we have always held spots #1-3 for a lot of our keywords but we have started to drop to lower on the first page. So i have been researching to see if some of the new algorithm changes are targeting sites with this type of functionality. If i have some data i could definitely get them to remove it. So the question is, do pop-ups hurt your organic ranking? Thanks for the input! Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler1 -
What to do with bad webpage
Hello everyone, I have a page in my website that has a terrible link profile (95% exact match keyword links.) What is the best thing to do with this page? It provides no value, and if anything it is hurting me. Should I just delete the page, 301 it to an obscure page or something else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mjstout0 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
Is my footer bad? i.e. hurting rankings
Just curious what people think of my footer. I think it provides some value. Not that many people click on it but it doesn't look that bad in my opinion. Curious what others think. If getting rid of it would help SEO I'd look into it. I outsource all my coding though so don't want to spend money tweaking what doesn't need to be done. www.jobshadow.com Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110