Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I’d rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam.
The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a “blog” with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only “education” seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips:
I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66
Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like:
<strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder...</strong> How to Choose the Right Home Builder Building your own home is one of life's turning points. Who would pass up the excitement of putting up their very own abode? Everyone wants to build a home according to his or her taste and style....
I can guarantee none of my blogs are about building houses, but whomever the SpamMaster is, all of the content looks like this- an opening title in <strong>…</strong> tags, then a few lines of crap.
Repeatedly, and apparently in total vain, I have blogged openly that the Great God Google has some responsibility here. Why? It is the pursuit of Google Page Rank and the methodology that gets sites to appear on Google tat is the 10000% motivation for comment spammers- they will do everything possible to force a URL into any open orifice of a web site, meaning any form that will manage to post a link to a web site. The more links into a Evil Crap Ass Site a spammer can generate, the more page rank the links form there get.
Google creates ALL of the incentive for blog spam, and from what I can see, has done absolutely zero to do something about it. With all their gazillions of dollars, skyrocketing stock prices, legions of brilliant technical staff… the sit on their collective hands (or whatever happens at the GooglePlex) while tens? more of thousands of individual bloggers are over run with what is basically a frontal assault attack on their personal publishing space.
If I were a new blogger, and got the crap I mention above in my blog on my passionate topic, be it education or knitting or fishing or exotic race cars… I would be quick to give up.
It’s time someone holds Google’s feet to some fire. I dont have that kind of power, but what the bleepity bleep bleep bleep BLEEP is it going to take?
Google, I love your search and tools, but your monetary incentive providing to blog spammers is killing the love.
It’s rather simple to me- remove the incentive / reward for spammers, and their activity goes away (or elsewhere). Google has enough intellectual prowess to create some amazing pieces of technology, but I’ve not seen one bit of that go into stomping out this menace. Oh, well I should give credit for the impressive “nofollow” tag (yeah, like that did anything).
Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam.
Am I the only one incensed? I feel I am alone, howling at the moon. In vain.
Grrrrrrr. Was hoping for a happy blog post day, but the rain of spam has killed that.
And I think it’s only going to get worse. I keep an eye on internet marketing circles (most subcultures fascinate me–what can I say?), and there’s new, inexpensive software coming out every day that makes it easy to for “marketers” to get such backlinks by spamming blogs.
You are not alone. I have been deleteing 100’s of spam comments from this one entry on my school blog and it is very annoying. I was seriously contemplating deleting that entry, since it seems to be the only one getting hit, but then I figured they would just target another one. thanksfully I am on moderated status so they don’t show up ever, but adds to my time moderating.
CAPTCHA is your friend. Implement some proof of life, however minimal, and you will find the comment spam drops away!
The incentive will always be there as long as links work and people have things to sell.
I’m mixed on captchas Tom, as many (e.g. Typepad) or just horrendously PITA as a user. I am more fond of recaptcha http://recaptcha.net for both the implementation and its **ahem** collective intelligence approach to digitizing books.
However, I realize I left out an important note- alot of this spam is also trackback pings, so a captcha does not help there.