The Honest Way

The Honest Way says “Beware, bloggers with new upgraded page ranks, there be snakes in the grass!”

I mean spammers who have an uncanny knack of sniffing out newly promoted blogs and upping their quota of spam comment attacks.

It never ceases to amaze me how they can have the intelligence to find the right sites and blogs to spam on, yet they display the utmost stupidity when it comes to using that knowledge to actually gain some link love from these blogs that they’ve gone to so much trouble to sniff out.

My advice to all bloggers is to unite to stamp out this menace by strangling and smothering their outlets. It’s easy to do and you’ll be doing your blog a big favour by not inadvertently allowing even one of these spam comments to slip though and be spidered by the search engines.

What do you mean?

I mean that if even one of these spammers manages to get a link back to one of their sites from a comment you display, the search engines may penalize your blog severely for linking to a possibly banned site at worst or a pornographic, hate, racist or other known spamming one at best. It could get your blog de-indexed, that’s how serious it could be for you. So you need to make sure your blog is water-tight.

At the very least, enable moderation of comments on your blog. All blogging platforms allow you to do this, so you have no excuse for not moderating comments. If you don’t know what that means, well it means that all comments that are made on your blog are held in a queue awaiting your approval if you want to display the comment, or deletion if you think it is spam or inappropriate. Links to spammers sites are not spidered by the search engines until you approve them.

Better is to activate a spam defence program plugin for your blog - Wordpress have one called Askimet which I use on all of my self-hosted blogs and it traps 95% of spam comments - and my moderation system traps the other 5%, so I have total control over what comments make it onto my blog’s pages.

If all bloggers stopped all spammers from obtaining even one search engine spidered link from blogs, we will have won a major battle in the war against spam.

Be vigilant and kill spam before it gets a foot in your door.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way