As the moment, there are 46 spam comments in my blog waiting to be moderated; in other words, deleted! I get perhaps a dozen or so per day and it constantly amazes me to see what inane garbage some people decide to post. So that led me to think about writing an article on the subject of spam.
The reason people post these ridiculous comments is, of course, that they want to obtain a link from my blog to their website. As you are probably aware, Google uses inbound links as part of their algorithm for ranking sites in their index. Most of the spammers use automatic tools to post, and they blast a single comment out to many thousands of blogs simultaneously, hoping to get a small percentage through the defences of the hosting blogs.
Spam comments are generally easy to spot. You often don’t even need to read them to see them for what they are. They are often full of links – a dead giveaway – or they comment on completely irrelevant pages such as my archives page, saying how wonderfully well it is written – clearly not from a human.
For a bit of fun, I thought I would show you the kind of comments we often get, so here are some examples:
That is really attention-grabbing. You are an overly professional blogger. I have joined your rss feed and look forward to looking for extra of your wonderful posts. Also, I have shared your website in my social networks
Firstly, it was posted against the archives page and secondly, it is far too generic a comment; in fact, it is one I get repeatedly. This is a sheer lack of creativity on the part of the spammer.
Woah this weblog is wonderful I love reading your articles. Stay up the good work! You know, many persons are hunting round for this info, you can help them greatly.
Again a very generic comment. This kind of comment is designed to massage the ego of the blogger. But the phrase ‘stay up’ is also a giveaway, clearly it is the result of an automatic spin of the more colloquial ‘keep up’.
Thanks for another informative web site. Where else may I am getting that kind of info written in such an ideal way? I’ve a venture that I’m simply now working on, and I’ve been at the glance out for such info.
This person has been on the ‘glance out’ – what? Again, he needs a better phrase spinner – it should have been, of course, ‘look out’.
By the way, those comments are some of the better ones, at least in terms of spelling and grammar, despite the fact that they are (I want to say ‘simply’ but I’ll resist the temptation) very badly written.
Actually, I love getting comments from readers. But, as I have said before, we don’t publish every comment. We don’t even publish every comment we get from real people. We publish thoughtful comments submitted by people who genuinely have something interesting to add to the discussion.
People don’t need to agree with me to get published here. But they do need to be able to spell, punctuate, write in sentences – and actually make a bit of sense!
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Hi Will,
I have to say that since you have directed me as my mentor, showing me some plug ins for my blog, I have experienced very few spam responses.
Oh, what a relief!
Joci James
Imagine the junk that the postman would have to deliver every day if there were no fee for posting cards/notes/letters! For that reason, I favor a fee (of half the rate for a 1-ounce letter) for each piece of e-mail sent.
Each e-mail account could include some modest quantity of e-mails to be sent fee-free (say 15 +/- per month). Thereafter, each e-mail sent that month would be charged a fee that would become part of the monthly billing; here in the U.S., that would amount to around $0.25; if I sent 35 e-mails in a given month, my usage fee would be around $5.
Does anyone agree with me that this would not only limit spam but also reduce tired jokes, inane chatter about nothing, and unwanted offers from businesses you patronize?
Why should you and I subsidize all the spam that basically is getting a free ride to clog our Inboxes?
As a blogger myself, I know because of spam can give us a real problen sorting out which is spam and which is not
I generaly go through all comments so I can delete unwanted links or the whole of the comment
I noticed many of the comments have false email addresses, so that’s also a give away