How to discern convincing spam from real comments

SPAM is becoming more and more convincing. After years of dealing with it, it never occurred to me that to new site owners it can be very difficult to tell convincing spam from real messages. Computers are becoming better at this than people ever were or might ever be —

no spam! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

even I occasionally get tricked.

A site I’ve helped set up as a community project recently had a comment come in. It is new and is receiving its first spam messages (though we already have methods in place to protect the site from spam). The site owner ran across a comment that does indeed look real, but to the experienced SPAM expert (such as myself) it clearly is spam.

The comment left by the spammer:
Name: Heather E. Nelson
Website link provided: businesstraveltours.com x
Email provided: melm2067@gmail.com *
IP posted from: 174.139.13.179 *
(*Spammers do not deserve privacy).
The message:
“Woah! I’m really loving the template/theme of this site. It’s simple, yet effective. A lot of times it’s very hard to get that “perfect balance” between user friendliness and appearance. I must say you have done a amazing job with this. In addition, the blog loads super quick for me on Firefox. Exceptional Blog!
http://www.businesstraveltours.com is my website.”

Looks like a nice complement, right? Wrong. But, don’t worry if you didn’t get why, here are some steps you can go through to determine if a comment is spam:

i. The name of the commenter. Spam
messages will often have a company or product name instead of a human
name. In the case of this message, the name
appears legitimate.

ii. The link on the comment. A spam
commenter will always post a link, either in the “Link”
field or in the comment itself. You can check the link out to see if it
looks like it goes to a legitimate service. This is where I knew that
the comment above was spam. The company it
links to, “Business Travel Tours”, is not a legitimate site. You can
look up site trustworthiness here: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.businesstraveltours.com

(just copy/paste the link found in the comment into the search in the upper right-hand corner).
(You can also install the addon called MyWot on just about any browser, check out their page on how to do this. That way, you can verify the legitimacy of any website on the Internet).

iii. The content of the comment. Often spam comments will not relate
to the article it was posted to. Lately, more spammers have been
posting very generalized spam, such as the message above — it could fit into just about any article/page because it is a
comment about the whole site and how it looks.

iv. The email address. Spammers sometimes have real or fake emails that are either active or inactive. The email address above looks plenty legitimate. Sometimes spammers will have completely random addresses made up of nonsense letters and numbers. This is becoming less common than it used to be

Over time as you get more spam, you will start to immediately recognize when something is not right. I find it fascinating how spambots operate and how good they are getting and I hope that you too will begin to see how that is significant.

Do you have examples of tricky spam? How do you go about figuring if it is real or computer generated? How much spam do you get?