Have you Given Your Dog Tramadol Today?
Those who know me also know how much I like all the comment spam I am getting on this and other blogs of mine 
Really folks, could I wish for more than free research delivered straight into my moderation queue? You just gotta figure out how to use it, make a few steps to implement it - and you’re set. If something is being spammed there is money in it to be made.
Sometimes the spam I get is weird, sometimes it is funny. Sometimes I can’t help laughing at the broken tools the spammers are using (e.g. the one that splits their keyword list into single separate meaningless keywords and spams that - just one of the recent curiosities I came across). Sometimes, however, my comment spam really makes me wonder.
I’ve been getting “tramadol dog” spam for ages now - and it always made me wonder if that’s just uncanny scraped keywords that have never been filtered from complete nonsense or if it’s a legitimate keyword for those pharma guys. Today my curiosity took over and I decided to do a quick check.
The Google search for “tramadol for dog” has revealed that this infact is not a made up keyword. In the top 10 results, I have noticed some vet sites, some .edu sites - and I don’t mean spammed by parasites but a legitimate research on a College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences site, Yahoo! Answers - and the question/answer seemed legitimate as well… It appears that tramadol is prescribed to dogs to relieve pain, e.g. after surgery or in case of arthritis or other chronic conditions.
I have noticed that Google only lists 565,000 results for this search - hmm, not too competitive is it? What’s interesting is that there’s not that much spam in the top 10 either - I have only seen two outright spammy results and one a bit spammy looking blog seemingly written manually but for the sake of placing AdSense onto it. I wonder why, considering that I do get all this comment spam for this keyword? Maybe the search volume is not that big for spammers to target seriously?
I checked Google Trends and got this:
Your terms - tramadol for dogs - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.
OK so that could be the answer - but still I guess as a long tail keyword it might be of some interest to pharma spammers, no? Actually, ranking for it should only take an aged domain (at least 2006) and a few thousand links… If you are/were a pharma spammer would you go for it?
March 25th, 2008 at 4:45 am
That’s funny, I actually did give my dog Tramadol the other day for an ear infection. I didn’t buy it on the intertubes though.
March 25th, 2008 at 6:05 am
We should brace ourselves and wait for the inevitable “viagra for dog” - the only thing that can really help the “stressed-out, contemporary city dog”
And the subsequent “viagra for dog serps”
March 25th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Heck this could start a whole new industry - pharma for dogs