Cutting comment spammers off at the knees

Vig-RX is at it again. Comments are now pouring into Web sites with links from Vig-RX to a variety of medical and herbal products.

Vig’s modus operandi is to sign up for affiliate accounts around the Web. Then he registers some domains, put up a single page that redirects to the affiliate links he’s created and starts spamming.

Anil Dash put a stop to it a few weeks ago by asking the affiliate provider to cancel Vig’s account. They did, and that put Vig out of business for a short time — until he signed up for new accounts.

Sites are now getting comments containing around 60 domains related to various products, all linking to a small handful of affiliate accounts. But I’m happy to report that Vig has once again put out of business.

I talked to Anil and found out exactly how he’d gotten Vig’s account canceled last time, honed the technique, and now I’m publishing it here (with Anil’s permission).

The first step was to actually visit some of the links that Vig is posting. Once they redirect, you can look at the URL and find the affiliate code. Track down a contact link or form and now you can ask them to cancel the account belonging to that affiliate ID. Before they’ll agree to cancel it, however, you’ll need to supply some proof that the affiliate is spamming. One piece of proof is the email that your comment system sent you when they posted. Another way to provide proof is to find other sites that have been spammed.

Search Blogdex, Technorati, and Google for sites linking to your spammer’s domain. Copy the URLs for any searches you find and include them when you email the affiliate program. For instance, if you were complaining that foo.com were spamming, you could send a link to Google’s link search: http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.foo.com

Armed with links to sites that have been spammed, a copy of the spam sent to you, and the affiliate’s ID code, you can now send a message to the owner of the affiliate program. I use something like this, feel free to adopt it and change as needed:

One of your affiliates has been spamming the comment forms of Web sites using a domain that redirects to your site using affiliate code XYZ.

You can see a sampling of sites that have been spammed at http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.foo.com and a copy of the comment that I received below.

Please take action and suspend this account.

——
[copy of the spam you received.]

If you track down the hosting company that owns the domain’s servers, you can use this same technique to get their hosting account canceled.