Podcast Spam Honeypot

A few months ago I posted Leo McGarry-like Walk-in Privileges, and because it contained an audio file, a link to the post ended up both on my list of sounds, and in my podcast feed.

A few weeks later, I started to receive spam like this:

Hey Leo McGarry-like Walk-in Privileges,

You’ve dropped around 10 episodes since 2016.. that’s real consistency. But here’s the wild part: YouTube’s algorithm hides more great podcasts than it helps.

and:

Hi Leo McGarry-like Walk-in Privileges,

Optimizing YouTube videos shouldn’t require a PhD in “Algorithm Studies” but sometimes it feels like it does.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was getting bucketloads of email address to “Leo McGarry-like Walk-in Privileges.”

Finally, I realized that the RSS feed I’d set up for the podcast was using the title of the latest episode as the title of the podcast. Podcast SEO crawlers were sucking this in, and marketing to me spamming me assuming that was my brand.

I’ve since fixed the problem. The spam continues.