One of the great things about blogs is that they traditionally allow people to comment on their content, and provide a neat interactive environment for blog readers and writers.
Well, like everything else in life (I know, I know, you are probably sick of hearing this from me) there is always a generous inventory of idiots standing ready to come out and do their best to ruin a good thing.
In this case, I am talking about ‘comment spam,’ and if you have a blog that is even somewhat popular, you have likely encountered this despicable phenomenon.
It’s well know that the more live links that lead to a particular web site, the more popular that site is likely to be in the eyes of the major search engines. If thousands of web sites contain live links to a site, that site has a much better chance of coming up near the top of the results when someone searches for a topic related to that site on one of the big search engines.
For example, go to Google and search for the word ‘failure’ and observe the results. You will likely see sites that feature information on George W. Bush and Michael Moore very near or at the top of the first page of results.
This is due to the fact that a number of web site operators who do not like George W. Bush created live links on their web sites that prominently feature the word ‘failure’ and point to a particular site that contains information on our current president.
This was most likely an organized effort on the part of those that don’t care much for ‘W’ and it appears they were pretty successful just using live links to create the desired result.
Apparently, the opposition decided to do the same favor for Michael Moore, and consequently, he also appears prominently in the Google search results for the word ‘failure.’
These examples show how effective live links are for boosting a web site’s popularity, and this is the reason comment spammers do what they do.
Basically, comment spammers unleash ‘bots,’ which are programs designed to go out and locate blogs on the Internet. When the bots locate a blog, they attempt to post comment spam in response to the articles on that blog.
As you might suspect, the comments that are posted with these comment spam bots contains a link to whatever site they are trying to promote. The more links, the more likely the site they are promoting can achieve top search engine rankings.
If their bots manage to post comment spam on a thousand blogs, that adds up to a lot of live links pointing to the site they are promoting. And, since many blogs are attractive targets for search engine ‘spiders,’ due to their frequently-updated content, comment spam has probably been a quick an effective way for sites employing comments spammers to rise quickly in the search engine rankings.
In many cases, high search engine rankings can mean big dollars. These sites selling Viagra and fake Rolex watches have a better chance of selling more if their sites appear on page one of the Google search results when someone searches for one of their products.
Comment spam is pretty easy to spot. The variety I have encountered consists mainly of lame comments like, ‘Keep up the good work. I really like your site.’ or ‘I found your site by accident but I am glad I did. I am going to tell my friend about it.’ And of course, the live link back to the site they are promoting.
Comments spam was not much of a problem for this blog until recently. For the past few days I have been waking up every morning to multiple mail messages that were generated by the blog software that I use to run this blog.
Even though I had this blog configured to prevent comments from actually appearing in the blog until I approve them, the software would generate an e-mail message to me each time someone (or ‘somebot’ as the case may be) posted a comment that was waiting for approval. Waking up to 20 or 30 spam comments waiting to be approved or deleted (guess which fate they met?) every morning was getting a bit annoying.
This is where the good guys come in. As many sneaky and creative tricks the lowlife of the Internet come up with to ruin things for other folks, we are very fortunate that there is an opposing force of good guys who come up with incredibly useful tricks and tools to stop the lowlife in their tracks.
I was lucky enough to locate a wonderful product that was the brainchild of one of these Internet good guys. He goes by the name ‘Dr. Dave’ and the product he created is called ‘SK2‘ or ‘Spam Karma 2.’
What this wonderfully useful tool does is plug in rather seamlessly to the blog software (in the case WordPress) and direct comment spam into the trash where it belongs. If you check along the left column of this blog, you will see the stats which reveal how much comment spam has been intercepted and tossed onto the swill pile without any continuing intervention or effort on my part. Brilliant!
In my humble opinion, it’s guys like ‘Dr. Dave’ that are the unsung heroes of the Internet. They make life on the net a lot more pleasant for the rest of us by helping us keep the constantly-evolving population of Internet lowlife under control. Thanks guys!
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