Damn Blog Spam : Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

It's for bashing the dust out of the mattress. (Jack Tweed)

Damn Blog Spam

12th November 2003 by Simon

You may or may not know;

blogs get a high positioning within Google search results. There are a number of reasons for this, including they are normally heavily linked to - which Google concludes means it is popular

To increase the Google ranking on a Web site, it’s a good idea to get a link from a highly ranked site - the higher their ranking, the more Google adds weighting to the value of their link - ranking your site higher

Many blogs have the facility that anyone can leave comments on them

Adding the above three facts together has generated a new form of Spam (IDefine: communication that has been abused to perform the function of advertising).

Blog Spam started pounding my site about a month ago. Briefly I wondered, if in some strange way I should be flattered/shocked that my site gets sufficient traffic to have appeared on the spammers radar. Snapping back to reality; I’m sure many sites are getting hit, and it is actually just annoying, as it’s taking a huge amount of time to clear it up.

There have always been the occasional spam-ish type comments posted, but these were fairly easy to deal with. Pondering the dilemma a while back, I took the decision to turn off HTML in comments, to stop people posting HREF’s. Didn’t feel right to do really and it reduced the convenience and usefulness of the additional information that commenting readers had left - but it did reduce the number of spam-ish postings.

It really is a great shame that this is being abused, as it could have the potential result that people simply just turn off the ability for readers to add their comments to a site - making it all far less personal. Looks like Mena and Ben over at SixApart have a couple of irons in the fire to counter it.

I’m going to pursue a number of routes to try and stop it but if that fails, I’ll have to remove the comments - dealing with the spam is just taking too long in busy times.

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