This blog has been under a pretty heavy sustained spam attack for the last couple of days. In the last 12 hours, over 500 attempts got past Bad Behavior (gods know how many were blocked in that period by BB) - but not a single one got past Akismet, which handles anything that isn't obvious spam. I was trying to figure out why the sudden attack, and then it struck me - the Google Pagerank of the site must have changed, making it a juicier target.
For some reason, the Google Pagerank is now up to 7. For a mundane, narcissistic, banal collection of stuff.
Google Pagerank for D'Arcy Norman dot net
For perspective, I checked what the PR of the City of Calgary website is. 6. Weighted higher than a website for an entire city of a million people. Granted, the city website sucks twelve ways from sunday, but still...
The University of Calgary? 8. This blog is weighted almost as highly as an entire research university's website. w. t. f. ?
That's just bizarre. Hopefully just a glitch in the PR algorithm. But it does explain the sudden surge in spam attacks. They must be using Google's own APIs to determine juicy targets to hit. Nice. Thanks for that.
Another factor that might make this blog a juicy target for spammers is that I don't use the rel="nofollow" attribute on comment links. If a comment isn't spam, it deserves to be counted as a link. That's what the internet is based on, not discounting an entire set of links just because they may or may not be spam - especially when the comments have already been marked as non-spam. Spam comments don't get posted (or if they do, they don't live long) here.