Fighting Comment Spam
If you have been a blogger for any amount of time you are sure to have been a victim of comment spam. If you are one of the lucky few that don’t know what comment spam is I will give you a brief explanation. Comment spam also known as blog spam is a form of spamdexing. Spamdexing is by definition the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results.
The comment spam I have received have usually been short comments that make very little sense with a link included. Most of the time there is no rhyme or reason to the comments. Spammers run automated scripts that post these comments. You may be surprised to find out that these spamming practices are not just the practice of smut sites. There are many professionals (term used loosely) that are using comment spam tactics.
Google has tired to solve some of this spam indexing by allowing the rel= “nofollow” to be added to a link which in turn is ignored by the Googles index. This tag tells the search engines not to follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of the document.
As a paid blogger you should be aware that these nofollow tags do not completely prevent comment spam and can cause the advertisers links to be useless. Most weblog software includes these nofollow tags in the comment section of your blog as a default application. As long as the tags are in the comment section only this should not effect the advertiser inbound links. However if this tag is in the meta section of your code it should be removed if possible. Some weblog software do not give you the option of removing these tags. If you want to find out if you have nofollow tags visit the homepage of your blog, click the “view” button on your browser and then click “source”. A note pad window should appear, click the “edit” button and then “find”. Type in the words “nofollow” (without the quotes). If it finds nofollow it means your blog has the nofollow tag. Like I said before if the tag is in the comment section of your blog it shouldn’t affect anyone but the people commenting. The benefit of these tags is that is can reduce the amount of comment spam you receive. Some spammers however still allow the automated software to find blogs with the nofollow tags because they are counting on the blog readers to view and possibly click on the links.
At this point there is no way to prevent comment spam. There are however ways to treat it. One way is to delete each and every post. This option many not be the easiest way to handle comment spam if you are receiving 500 comments or more a day.
There are a few plugins available that will catch the spam for you before it is posted. The most popular plugin is Akismet. Akismet is truly a lifesaver for some bloggers. Akismet is a very easy plugin to use and for WordPress blogs it is already a plugin application installed in the software. Other weblog software can use Akismet as well. You can visit the development page to find out if a plugin is available for your blog software. Once Akismet catches the comment spam it holds the comments for 15 days before deleting. Occasionally the plugin with put real comments in the spam category so be sure to check your Akismet spam section regularly.
Unfortunately spamming is not going to end any time soon. So, we as blogger are left with having to deal with it. Fortunately there are plugins like Akismet that can help.
Mona Weathers
Mona’s Blog
November 7th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Thanks for the posting Mona. I was having a huge problem with porn spam on my personal blog. I use WordPress, and I found a great area in the Discussions section that lets you add terms to auto kill the comment. Once I added the list that WordPress recomended, and added all the other terms that I was seeing from the spam comments, I have really put an end to it.
I did have to add a couple general terms that could stop an occasional legit comment, but I’m going to work on installing Akismet and see if that works well enough to take those terms out of the list.
November 7th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
Hi Mona,
Thanks for your post about ‘comment spam’- something I really haven’t bothered much about as my focus has been to write, write and write - in that order.
Things are changing now with paying blog and all that. Thanks to Blogitive, it has restored my faith in online business dealings.
By the way, in Wordpress, blog hit stats is easily shown. Would you have an idea how we can find it in Blogspot? I don’t mean the “profile view stat” because this can easily be padded. Thanks.
Cheers!
November 8th, 2006 at 3:16 am
Thanks Mona. I haven’t had this problem yet but I’m going to follow your instructions. I know that some people have given up blogging because of this.
November 8th, 2006 at 11:03 am
The nofollow tag issue can cause lots of havoc and confusion for bloggers and advertisers alike.
There are many misconceptions that if a nofollow tag exists anywhere on a source page, such as in the comments, that it degrades the benefit of a reciprocal link. This is not true.
From an advertisers perspective, nofollow tags actually improve the value of an advertising article or press release. If an advertiser receives a write up along with a reciprocal contextual link in that write up, it will not necessarily serve their purpose or benefit the advertiser for that article to be followed by spammy comments, possibly including links to the advertisers competitors or to a pronographic site or something.
The nofollow tag in the comments doesn’t stop all comment spam, but does serve as disincentive for spam from an SEO and article hijacking perspective.
I utilize a meta tag in my blogs to push for the robots to follow tags as opposed to not follow
I’m led to believe that having no Meta tag would work just the same, but sometimes I find it useful to point to this such that an advertiser can explicity see the value they are receiving from a press release on my website.
:)
Regards! Brett
November 8th, 2006 at 11:04 am
My apologies, I attempted to include the code for the meta tag, and of course it was not included in the comment (lol) serving to protect the comment from link spam I’m sure. It is available on my website in the source code.
November 8th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Ed,
Thanks for including that information about the Discussions area in wordpress. Yes, that is another way to handle comment spam. I think Wordpress has included Askimet to the latest version to keep up with the latest spam words and tactics.
“There was a time when copying and pasting the list below into your WordPress installation would protect you from the vast majority of comment and trackback spam out there, however that time has long passed. These days a more adaptive solution like Akismet or one of the other fine comment spam plugins is much better protection against spam on your blog.”
I got this quote from codex.wordpress.org
Tel,
I don’t think BlogSpot has any tracking system available other than for the profile page. There are tracking scripts you can easily add to your template. MyBlogLog.com has a great tracking script. It’s also a blog community so you get more visibility than with most stat tracking systems. You can also add another script that will allow you to see (photos) of what MyBlogLog members have visited your site. I just found out about this and am very pleased. It’s free too.
Hey Brett I know you
.
Thanks for including your input. I agree that the nofollow tag can benefit the advertiser if it is only in the comment section. If you have a plugin like Askimet I don’t think it is necessary to add this tag. Do you agree?
It could be that by having nofollow tags in the comment section you could be missing out on some “good inbound links”. I am still learning about SEO so I don’t know if I am correct in my thinking on this.
Everyone else,
Thanks for the comments.
November 9th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Hi Mona,
Great to see you here!
~back at yah
I’m not sure I understand how the nofollow tags in the comments would elliminate some opportunities for good inbound links?
You could be right, I just don’t know. I guess when I trade links, I usually put them in the sidebar there are not any ‘nofollow’ tags there.
I also exchange links with an article (deeplinking) to someone’s blog and the actual article doesn’t have any nofollow tags either.
I do like MyBlogLog from a Reader’s interface perspective, but I’m guessin it has very little SEO value as there are not any actual hyperlinks to the visitors own blogs.
I think its a great way to encourage viewers to participate and put a face to a name and give the blog a more personal feeling (kind of adapting some of the good from forums and MySpace). Of course these things can be abused if someone uploads an offensive image and it shows up as a visitor on a PG blog.
Nothing is perfect, I guess . . .
November 9th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I turned off no follow, and will allow comments on my blog to place links if they aren’t spammy. That said, Akismet is a great tool for cutting down on true spam, and it’s an easy to use WP plugin.
November 9th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Brett,
I never thought of offesive images. You’ve made a good point.
Hey Colleen,
Nice to se you here