How to know a comment is fake

I get a lot of strange comments on Beamtic's articles. The vast majority of them are easy to recognise, and will be deleted without me ever reading them. But, occasionally I also quickly skim through the spammy ones. A lot of them seem to be SEO motivated comments—since they contain links in the body—but some has no links or direct references or clues as to who the sender is. That is when I get puzzled, since there seem to be nothing to be gained from posting it.

Of course, it is difficult to conclude anything about the sender of the more pointless of the comments. All I can say for sure is that someone consciously decided to run some sort of automated spam software, and it managed to find it's way to my site. They are most likely not even targeting your website specifically—they are probably attacking thousands of websites with their spam.

Most spam can easily be recognized, simply because it is out of context and the main idea or central thought in the comment applies too broadly, or, in other words, the message is too generalized. They might compliment your writing skills, the comprehensiveness of your website, or simply state that their "wife" informed them about your site and they decided to bookmark it—in the most uncreative cases they merely comment with the words: "great article".

If in doubt whether something is spam, you can also Google part of the comment text in quotes, to see if it has been submitted elsewhere. Ultimately, there are times where I would accept "spammy" looking comments, but each case should be judged separately and within the context of the article.

Most blackhat SEO spam software is still very primitive, thankfully, and not capable of posting relevant or original comments. Even most of the best AI's today will still fail at writing relevant comments. That is because it is very hard to imitate a genuine comment made by a real visitor to a website.

Contacting the spammer

The contact information submitted along with a spam comment is most likely fake. While some of these mass-delivered comments look very real, you have to maintain a policy of never contacting someone through the e-mail they leave in a comment form, since they might be victims of a blackhat spammer.

In this case, the name "Erika Miller" and website, courseduck.net, could very easily be fake or victems of a reply spam campaign.

But, even if it was real, I probably would not accept the comment, since it has no relevance to the article where it was posted, and I also would not reply to the e-mail, since the owner could be the victem of a replay spam campaign.

I noticed that other website owners was accepting the same comment, and even replying "yes" to the comment, only to have a follow-up comment by the spammer that repeats, basically, the same question. This suggests that the spammer did not even read the response from the website owner, and that they are running some sort of automated spam software en-masse.

Usually, real visitors will not contact you through a comment form with such requests, since it is highly unprofessional. They would probably send you an e-mail or connect with you on social media instead. Besides, the whole "we want to feature your website in our newsletter" story just seems totally weird to me! If you want to recommend a website to someone, just do it—do not ask the owner first!

Public comment forms can easily be abused, and there is often no way for us to know if people who comment are who they claim to be.

Tell us what you think: