In the past 24 hours, I’ve suddenly experienced a huge influx of spam comments on this blog. At first I was very annoyed. My e-mail inbox was flooded with new comment notifications from WordPress. I had to login and delete (and subsquently blacklist) them all. After about an hour of being annoyed, a thought occurred to me. “Why am I getting attention from spammers all of a sudden?” In a way, it was actually kind of flattering. In the past, I have gotten just a handful of spam comments presumably because the spammers were busy spamming other sites that were more worth their (bots’) time. Then, I realized that maybe…just maybe.. my Google PageRank had gone up and thus made my blog more appealing to spammers. I checked and, in fact, www.itsrishi.com, is now marked as PR5. Now, to be honest, I’m not sure why I have a PageRank as high as 5. My backlinks don’t really seem to merit it. I’ve had some big (PR7-ish) blogs and aggregators point to some of my posts but those sites also have a large number of outgoing links. PR5 really does seem high. Is it a glitch? Possibly.

I’ll check my PR again later and monitor my metrics to see if I have any boost in traffic referrals from Google search result pages. If, in fact, itsrishi.com is a PR5, I should notice a boost in search referrals especially for popular keywords for which in the past I would be shoved waaayyy to the bottom, even if my post had good relevance.