Page comments without a form?

There’s a lot of lgeitimate looking comments that are only just SPAM. As the pages don’t have the comment areas on them, they would be submitted via automated bots that are built to do just this. Adding comments is a “preferred” black-hat SEO trick to get a backlink from your site to the SPAM’ers site, or their clients. You’ll find that pretty much all of the users that posted the comments have a backlink to some site that has nothing to do with yours.

If you don’t already, install and configure Akismet. It’s very good at blocking comment SPAM. There’s also other plugins available, so see waht combination can work for you.

Can you share one of the ones that you think is legit with us? It should be very easy to tell just from how it’s written.

Having waded through hundreds of comments over the years, I’m pretty confident in my ability to spot real comments vs pseudo-real comments. In the case of the few that I isolated yesterday, here’s the evidence that I see that tells me that they’re real:

• In the form data submitted, none of them include a backlink to another web site. They only have an email address.
• Two of the email addresses are tied to a local school.
• The comments all make very specific reference to services that are provided by my employer: horse camps, trail rides, etc. The following are some examples:

Hello, I was wanting to check your availability on your camps this summer in June? For two children. Thank you,

Jennifer

I found you guys through GROUPON that was sent to my email address. I am interested in enrolling my son in the Horseriding course. He is 9 years old and we would be able to attend the June 30-Jul 4th course, as I teach summer school and … can’t break away any sooner. Thanks for chatting with me on the phone this morning!
Have a blessed day!

What days are the trail rides? Is there one available this Friday, April, 11, 2014?

Hi, I was considering getting groupon deal for 4 people. Since we live an hour away from there, we were wondering about if there would be trail rides schedule on weekdays starting on March10th~14th (Spring Break)? Do we need to make reservation?

Re: the Groupon references in a couple of those comments, a large portion of the business that the ranch gets comes from a Groupon offer. This deal isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site, which means that those comments couldn’t come from spammers mining the site for random data they can use to make a comment sound legit.

If that’s not enough evidence, I looked up the IP addresses recorded with these comments. Almost all of them come from hosts in Texas from what I can see. We’re a Texas-based company, so that lends further credence to my theory.

Part of my concern, as you can imagine, is that people are sending these comments in and expecting a reply, but as far as I know nobody saw these comments until I found them yesterday. That means we’ve got potentially-dissatisfied customers out there, and I want to prevent that from happening in the future.

So respond to these people either on the comments page, or via email. You’ll either get a response, or you’ll get nothing. Either way you’ll know what you’re dealing with. ??

As you know comments have to be turned off at the post/page level and they should tell you which page/post they were submitted on. It’s very easy to miss blocking comments on a few pages…….If those pages/posts don’t have comments open, they must have been open at some point for submissions to have been made.
Then I’d make sure you’ve enabled email alerts so you know if any new comments are made.

Thanks. I was already planning on contacting these folks. I just wanted to know if there was any possible way for their comments to have been submitted without a form being on the page, like through some little-known back door method.

While chatting just now with the person who runs the ranch, I was told that they “forgot” that there were comments allowed before, and they were just recently disabled. Nice to get that info after spending hours trying to track down what I thought was a bug in the system. *sigh* Thanks for your help and patience.