Valentine Blog Spam: Final Update

This is the final update to the post V1agr4 Spam Is Old And Busted, Valentine Spam Is The New Hotness on the 10th of Feb where I talked about a new and troubling trend (I like using that phrase). In the first follow-up I informed you the Valentine spam was coming in pretty strong leading up to the big day.

Of the four questions I posed we can now answer some of them, and it’s interesting:

1. Q: How quickly will the ‘valentine’ keyword fall out of favor by the spammer(s)?
A: Pretty quickly, the Valentine specific comment spam fell out of favor as if a switch had been thrown. The last one came in at 11:49PM EST on Valentine’s Day (er, evening). Nice!

2. Q: Will it slow or stop in the few days leading to Thursday?
A: No, the trend of receiving 40+ per day kept up until the final night.

3. Q: Will it continue up to that very day when it’s basically too late to capitalize on the holiday searches because the blog may not be crawled in time?
A: Interestingly yes, the spam continued that day. That may or may not be odd depending on how you look at it. The spammer might get lucky and one of the spiders from GOOG, Yahoo!, Live might crawl my site that day and if one of the comments makes it through it would have an impact on Valentine keyword searches of the same day.

4. Q:If this spammer is targeting blog comments in blogs located primarily in the Western civilizations, then I suspect they will transition to the next big holiday after Valentines which is Easter. So, assuming this ‘ad campaign’ i’m watching is relatively successful enough for him/her to continue the trend, when will I see the first ‘Easter’ related spam comment?
A: This is to be determined, we’ll watch the spam for interesting trends and will keep you informed.

Related posts:

1. V1agr4 Spam Is Old And Busted, Valentine Spam Is The New Hotness
2. Valentine Blog Spam Update #1
3. Spam Update
4. GOOG Mistakes Own Blog for Spam, Deletes it
5. Turning Off Registration Requirements at Geeknews

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