CNN Blog Comment Spamming?

You’ll think for a minute you’re reading a spyware investigation, but Nick Lewis has fallen up some interesting evidence that CNN is engaging is stealthy blog comment spamming. How concerned should we be as bloggers and as marketers?

Last week, CNN appears to have attempted an unusual marketing campaign in the blogosphere. The campaign combined blackhat search engine optimization techniques, viral marketing tactics, and guerrilla comment spam. Unlike the majority of comment spam, this spam appears to only target blogs that have discussed CNN in the past 3 months. So far, 13 separate instances of the spam have been found. Most alarmingly, the spammers may have also left malicious keywords in 4 out of 13 of the targeted posts; its suspected the intent was to use google’s keyword stuffing detectors to censor them. According to my sources, as of 4/27/05 CNN denies that they had anything to do with this.

I’m going to leave comments on in this entry, just to see what might come along (and because I expect people like Wayne Porter and Jeff “I Love Comment Spam” Molander to have an interesting thought or two as well.)

[via the always wonderful Metafilter]

About Brian Clark

Brian Clark of GMDStudios (http://www.gmdstudios.com/)

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