Web form spam

[Steve Rindsberg]

I've got a couple of sites with contact forms, and every so often there's a burst of spam from them. The stuff that comes through email is totally, ludicrously obvious as spam. "One glance and whack the DEL key" obvious.

There's not even a plea for money or any other kind of call to action. Makes no sense.

Or didn't until I finally stumbled across an explanation today.

It seems that they're filling in any gibberish they can so as to be able to submit text in the comment field of the form. They're hoping to hit forms on web/blog pages that accept and publish comments automatically, as submitted.

The text in the comment field is mostly gibberish but there are always links. And there's the nut of it: the links point back to the spammer's site and while only an utter moron would click on them (and I imagine they get a share of those), links to the spammer's site appear on a web/blog page helps to bump the spammer's google rating.