After a couple of weeks of receiving some unusual comments at ForeverGeek, I took it upon myself and decided to clean the house.

Here are the lessons and other misc details that I learned from performing the hard task:

• sploggers are using “new” techniques to have trackbacks (read links) from original content (read specific posts). Most of the times, their post starts like this:

  “someone” wrote an interesting/fantastic post today, here’s a quick excerpt

  And it ends with a copy/paste + link of our original article. Obviously, the sploggers in question are using some kind of RSS software that can track keywords and copy the content, because only particular posts are being “plagiarized”.

• In ForeverGeek’s case, the targets are posts concerning games.
• Sploggers like to use .info domains because they are cheaper.
• Almost one month ago, a Spanish person left a rude comment, thank g-d people didn’t notice, it was hardcore.
• The niche’s keywords are used in the domain name of the splog. Example: xbox360bestgames.info
• Someone from Romania (or with a .ro email address) tried to include an affiliate Amazon link on a comment by using tinyURL. So smart!
• Some people don’t like to use their real email on the comments, so it is kind of usual to see a fake@email.com as the address.
• The sploggers IP were directed to the US (Texas, Minnesota) and Netherlands.
• From time to time, the Akismet anti-spam plug-in still approves comments made by splogs.