Blogging and Comment Spam

I know a thing or two about comment spam.

On ilovephysics.com I would see hundreds of spam comments every day. Many would be blocked by the various filters I had put in place, but more than enough got through, and it takes time deleting all that crap. After a while, the spammers figured out the various blockers and began going around them.

Assholes.

I run a site about physics, and I have idiots and their robots submitting comments about anal sex and texas hold-em poker. Why do they do this?

Many people think that comment spam arises from the assumption that if you throw your URL up enough places and at enough people, then it’s got to stick eventually. I’m sure there is a physics student out there somewhere who is also interested in animated Japanese porn.

But this is not the real motivation for these criminals (yes, they are criminals, and should be prosecuted for theft and violation of private property rights): They post every keyword they know related to their “site” along with their link. The search engines crawl my site, find these keywords associated with their link, and causes their page rank and placement to go up.

Of course, no one told these morons that Wordpress (as well as most major blog scripts) now incorporates rel=”nofollow” into comment links. So they get NO benefit from posting garbage.

Jason Cain talks about the current debate among internet marketers about this issue.

Here’s my take: There is little to no benefit gained via comment spam. In fact, you do it enough and you’ll piss off a lot of people. You get a reputation like that and you’re history. Comment spam is just plain criminal. People like Sean Felker are stealing advertising and bandwidth. If Sean wants to advertise his shtuff om my site, then he can pay me.

Marketing Chick has a great article about all of this here.

If you use Wordpress, then you can do what I did to stop comment spam dead in its tracks. Use SecureImage. It works.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 11:43 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.