Comment spam

[bill]

Not sure when this began, but it's fairly recent. I have some fairly popular Collections, and posts there over the past several weeks have been garnering an inordinate amount of nonsense, or one word comments. I had to turn off public commenting because of this. Some posts were getting one word comments like, "Hi", and there were hundreds of them.

I limited commenting to my Circles and that seems to have slowed them down. I tried reporting them in the beginning, but then it just became too much. After Google took away the flag where we could easily make reports from the notifications the process became too tedious.

Now I'm getting many more reshares of my posts where they comment "Hi" in the reshare. I have no idea why they would bother doing this.

Anyone else experience this?

[tangor]

Sounds like hackers testing the waters. That is speculation, not an assertion! the g+ team should address this immediately.

[bill]

The accounts have almost no followers. No posts to their credit. Nothing in the About section. They look like throw-away accounts. Not sure what they're trying to accomplish...

[martinibuster]

Affiliate spammers are several years behind the times in terms of SEO. Back in 2013 Rand Fishkin suggested that getting people to follow you on Google + will influence the SERPs so that the spammer's/mozzer's sites will rise to the top when you do a search. His post is titled, "Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time"

Then backlinko added google+ as ranking factor 144 (without any explanation to the source of that notion).

[bill]

So there must have been someone posting a new magic SEO tip in the affiliate spam community about Google+ over the past few weeks because this stuff just exploded out of nowhere. Most of it seems to be coming from India.