The following is a guest post by Jill Tooley of Quality Logo Products, for the 10 Things I Learned in 2010 series.
10 Things I Learned in 2010 About Blog Spam
1. It’s seemingly neverending…
When I log into WordPress every morning, I usually find at least 50 pending spam comments waiting for moderation. After a sigh and a head shake of disbelief, I send all of them to the virtual trash can and then find that more are waiting. Rinse, wash, and repeat this process enough times and you’ll start to harbor quite a distaste for spammers!
2. Spam comments are easy to spot.
A real person isn’t going to leave a comment about prescription drugs on your blog post (unless your post is about prescription drugs), type gibberish in the comment space, or include 20 links in his or her comment. Any of these should throw up a red flag and inspire you to delete.
3. Spam is easier to spot with avatars.
I recently toggled my WordPress settings to allow Gravatars and I set the generic avatar to Wavatars (cute little geometric shapes). Because the Wavatars are randomly generated according to email address and easily recognizable, I can quickly spot different spam comments that come from the same user!
4. Comments can come from different users but say exactly the same thing.
I often moderate the same vague and strangely-worded comments like: “Yes, I agree with told all above” or “Very interesting point that you make.” Even though these comments come from different usernames or email addresses, they’re clearly the same spam. I’ve become savvy to such generic responses and can now easily get rid of them!
5. Some spammers are cleverer than others.
Although many spammers use canned responses, type nonsense, or post too many links, some of them are more creative and manage to stump me for an extra second or two. I’ve received longer responses with normal sentence structure (proper punctuation, use of articles) that make absolutely no sense because they only include random keywords. At first glance, these comments appear real but they’re just another spam strategy.
6. Trackbacks can be spam, too.
I used to think that all trackbacks were from legitimate websites…silly me! Why would I want a trackback for casino games on my blog if it has nothing to do with my topic? Even though they’re not as plentiful, junky trackback links are as useless as junky comments.
Editor’s Note: Most of the time, trackbacks like that aren’t even really linking back to your site. Use Simple Trackback Validation to help crush this nonsense.
7. Spammy commenters can be blacklisted.
Unfortunately for me, I discovered this after about six months into the year! If there’s a commenter who never contributes anything but junk and uses the same email address every time, then you can copy and paste that into a filter on the admin side of your blog that will automatically sort it into spam. In WordPress, this option is under Settings > Discussion > Comment Blacklist.
8. Comments can be offensive and disgusting.
I’m not easily offended, but I’ve been taken aback by countless spam comments that link to pornographic sites. I now immediately blacklist any username or email address that includes references to such things!
9. Spammers rarely use human names.
As Tia mentioned in a recent post about comment etiquette, a kitchen appliance isn’t capable of commenting on your blog. If a keyword is listed as the username, then you can probably assume it’s trash-worthy! Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen my share of spam with human-sounding names but the vast majority of them contain only keywords or gibberish phrases.
10. Blog spammers are ruthless and persistent.
For every spammer I blacklist or every comment I delete, there are hundreds more that crop up to replace them. That’s not likely to change anytime soon, either, so I’ve learned to stay on top of it. Spam is like weeds in your garden and you have to be a dedicated “gardener” if you want to prevent them from taking over!
I’m sure I’ll continue to learn about blog spam in coming years, but 2010 certainly provided me with a solid crash course! Have you had the same issues with spam comments? Do you have any to add to my list?
About the 10 Things I Learned Series
From Tia: This is a guest blogging series on BizChickBlogs on 10 Things Learned in 2010. I’ve invited a handful of people to submit guest posts on this topic, and I would love to have more! If you have something you can write about, whether it be about what you learned about social media, having a blog network, taking time off, investing in premium plugins, starting another blog, closing a blog, whatever – contact me and let me know or read the guest blogging guidelines and send your guest post that way. Everyone is invited. Thanks!
Image credit: Shutterstock
Hi Tia thanks for the comment regarding Filipinos, I’m also a Filipino and work for different companies outsourcing in the internet. I’ve seen your post at techsnare and followed you here in your blog. though it seems that I’m having problem with akismet this time. I don’t know whether this comment will come out or not but I’ll hit you an email. Honestly speaking I’m reading how can I avoid being caught by spam filter like akismet because I have problems from bad neighborhood.
Matthew
Wavatar concept was quite new for me… something worth learning. Nice list.
Wonderful post!
As a relatively new blogger, I was stumped by such comments. Askimet seemed to know what they were. And since I was. i.e. smarter than Askimet -LoL!-not, I allowed many spam comments to stay. I even tried to interact with them, to no avail. I even thought the comments were in retaliation from another blogger for not allowing him/her to link to my blog. And that he/she linked anyway and the comments were coming from the drug rehabilitation site that she was bloggin on. The spammers honed in on a particular post Outfit of the Day 5: Casual Saturday, which is a tie-dye, dread locks and peace sign outfit. So, I thought there was a connection to drugs and the comments, since many of the comments were in reference to a great idea they seemed to have gotten from the post. I couldn’t fathom what this great idea was since it was such a short post.
One of funniest spam comments I received was this one below:
If we register at iranican.com to post blogs does our email get published? I see that your bloggers have their emails published.
My response was: I’m not quite sure what Iranican.com has to do with my blog. (I have never published any commenter’s email).
Finally, one day I closed the comments on that post. Then about a week later they started in on another post. However, I am now wise to the ways of spammers and now follow the recommendations of Askimet since it really is smarter than I when it comes to spam comments. LoL!
Spammers are getting pretty sophisticated these days. I like using GASP because it does at least filter out the bots. However, I find that people will leave spam type comments that say nothing more than just nice post.
I always debate a bit on those and try to err on the side of approving comments unless it’s utter nonsense or obvious spamming of links.
Hi Jill & Tia
I have GASP and Akismet on my blog. Only get a couple of spam per day, but then my blog isn’t very old. When I first started publishing posts I got heaps the first few days then they stopped for awhile.
I noticed in the past few days some genuine commenters landing in the spam folder which wasn’t good and some regular commenters in pending when they have always been approved before! Don’t know what happened there but it seems to have sorted itself as not happening now.
Patricia Perth Australia
That’s good. That is due to Akismet. I only have GASP activated, and I notice that I still get some spam but not as much. But at least no genuine commenters land in spam, which happens with Akismet. That’s why I stopped using it.
Eventually, people will catch on to GASP. Technically, it won’t be very difficult to hack with a program that learns how to check the box and subsequently detect and ignore the hidden field.
However, hopefully no one cares enough to hack it. lol That would be just ridiculous.
Patricia, thanks for the heads up! I am intrigued by all of the recommendations for GASP…I’ll have to give it a whirl.
First of all let me tell you thanks for tip #7. I didn’t know about that.
I had so many spam comments on my blog until I installed GASP plugin, which I see here too. I think it is the best thing after bread, lol. SInce I have it I haven’t had any spam comments.
I did receive a few trackbacks today that I deleted, they were obviously from “wrong” sites and not even linking to me.
I also noticed that spammers (bots) tend to do deep linking and rarely link to a blog home page (which most of us do when we comment).
Great list….gotta go tweet this post
I’m glad I mentioned something you didn’t already know, Brankica!
It took me forever to realize this function existed, and it’s been such a timesaver for me ever since. There was one spammer in particular who would post LONG comments about 25-30 times a day, and it was too much to handle after awhile…once I had blacklisted him/her it helped me actually read the real comments in a timely manner. Glad to hear I’m not the only one with junky trackbacks that don’t even link back – it’s SO frustrating!
Thanks for the comment!
Really it seems spam can win the battle, in some moments.
I’ve found some spammers, unfortunately with intelligence, that avoid controls.
According to the theme of the post, they looked for a complete-relative answer on the web, already posted before and comment with it.
You suspect of them because the comment isn’t totally adapted to the article.
A simple search with the text between ” ” can unmask them
Cheers,
Gera
I think of the internet as a numbers game. You have basically taken out a big portion of people who might help your blog out or could make you more money. Yes, there is a lot of spam going on but you need to take a different approach with them. They really do not hurt anythihng, they just take up space. I like any kind of traffic to my site because every visit is an opportunity to make something happen. After all, isn’t that what we all want? I hope you are not cutting off your nose in spite of your face. As you get rid of your spam, you may be getting rid of a great customer. You have to move and go through a lot of rocks and dirt to get to the GOLD!
In my opinion, getting a comment as long as it is not “great article” or “thank you for sharing” kind of comment is really a SPAM. I do agree that a lot of Filipino’s are being blocked because of spamming because they are really getting paid for it. I am for one a Filipino but I read through the articles first before commenting. If you think about it; it will be a win-win situation. Owners of the blog get a unique UGC and commentators will get a good link juice from the blog site. As long as it is not a single and boring comment, all is well. Thanks for sharing! LOL!
You’re welcome, Robert! I definitely see what you mean.
Actually many of the comments that are spam, come from software programs made exclusively for this kind of things, that’s why they don’t make any sense at all.
Not many spammers are writing their comments they just use a template of some sort and spam away. Anyway, this should be easily weeded out by akismet because their urls or emails are blacklisted quickly.
But sometimes one of them manages to pass those, but the majority can be spotted easily because it has the tell-tale signs.
My question is… if so many people are “hip” to blog SPAM and most people are able to battle it with ease (so suggestions in comments below), why do SPAMMERS even still try? I mean is a junk like really worth that much (in Google) these days?
Actually, Bret – it works like crazy. I recently checked a few well-written comments that were just vague and complimentary enough that I knew they were not legit (“You are one of my favorite bloggers, too cool to stop. Post again!” or the like).
I ran those comments in quotes in Google’s search bar…
One had 26 “hits” (obviously someone is conservative but still spamming)…
Another had 27,000 “hits” !!
And a third had 121,000+ “hits” – clearly the most intelligent of the bunch.
Imagine that – 121k or even 12k backlinks from a comment spam tool? Sadly, it still works.
Check out your competition’s backlinks (if you’re a niche marketer like me) – you’ll see literally hundreds or even thousands of these…
NOT that I advocate such since I don’t. But it does work.
I agree with James. My first “intro” to Internet marketing was on the dark side. So I know from experience that MOST blogs out there are not moderated and are left to rot. And so the spam and trackback feasting begins.
I think those of us who do something about it are in the minority. Really. There’s even a sports news blog out there (I will keep the name quiet) that doesn’t monitor anything at all, despite the fact that it gets about 200 comments a day from inanimate objects thanking them for such an “awesome” post.
Is there no outlet that spammers will not attempt to exploit?
I never realized how bad blog spam was until one day I had to cover for Jill because she was away from the office…
If we had as many LEGITIMATE comments as spam comments we receive in a day we’d have a higher user engagement with out blog than Yahoo.com – JK!
I want to look more into the Simple Trackback Validation Plug-in that Tia mentioned before. Are there any other plug-ins that are helpful but no so overbearing that you risk placing LEGITIMATE comments in the spam/trash folder in WordPress? That’s my biggest fear when it comes to these plug-ins; I don’t want to risk trashing REAL comments… Especially when they are so hard to come by these days.
Well the nice thing is that most of these plugins won’t just trash and delete them. Instead, they’ll place them in the Spam folder, so that you can see which are real or not. The Simple Trackback Validation plugin, when combined with Akismet, will display “[Blocked by STBV] in the name field when it comes into moderation – that way you will know that the plugin checked it out and saw that there was no link back to your site.
If the trackback is genuine, it’ll go into your pending queue as normal!
Cheers,
Tia
Tia thanks for the additional info/feedback.
We’ll give this a shot.
… SPAM BAD!
Jill most of these spammer avatars are generic and flat just horrible..they on will leave one sentence and think its really going to be accepted..these people crack me up.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
My favorites spam comments are FULL of strange characters and question marks with broken links…as if I’d approve something like that! Haha!
Antonion, again I find you here
I’m using Defensio plugin and must tell that I’m more satisfied than even with Akismet…
Thanks for the plug for another plugin – never heard of Defensio.
I was so happy to see your article on spam. I recently moved my blog from blogger.com to word press and the spam wasn’t an issue on blogger. I was thinking I did something wrong in the set up that was allowing all the spam to find me.
I will try some of your tips.
Thanks so much!
I’m so happy that I could help you somehow, Sandee! I’ve used Blogger in the past, but I find WordPress to be more user-friendly (although I’ve had my share of problems with it). I don’t think you necessarily did anything wrong, but sometimes you just need to toggle the settings to the way you want them. Default settings are very basic and may not offer the spam protection you want.
I must say that I agree with your list on this one. I’m now using the GASP plugin (like you’re using here, it seems) but also Akismet to catch what does make it through GASP. Before I would get maybe 100-200 spam comments a day, now I get less than 10, so it’s easy to sort through them and approve whatever comments ended up in spam by accident because of Akismet.
I’ve also noticed, because I have a do-follow blog, that I tend to get many spam’ish comments from, usually, the Phillipines, linking to websites (that offers a product/service) in the United Kingdom or similar. Smells to me as if somebody is being paid to comment on do-follow blogs…. I don’t mind hitting the “spam” button on such comments when it becomes obvious that they’re only commenting for one reason: getting the do-follow link.
Thanks for the feedback, Klaus!
We get the same comments from the Phillipines that link to UK sites, and we get an unreal amount of spam in German as well! I always hit the spam button on these guys and feel no remorse. I love that the filter catches repeat offenders and blacklists them, but of course they eventually change their email addresses or URLs and then I have to start all over again…oh well, it’s all part of the business, I suppose!
Do you use the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin that Tia suggested in her editor’s note? I’ll have to check that out.
Have a great day and thanks again for your comment!
Spammers are really unwanted. Well this is very important to know how to detect the spammers to avoid it. Why is it only the Philippines you are talking about? Filipino’s are very good at working, I have one employee from the Philippines he’s doing web design for me. He is great and doing his job perfect! Well, I just appreciate him and his country.
Anyway, I like this post! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Tia, thanks for your comment!
I hope you didn’t misunderstand me…of course I wasn’t saying anything negative about the Phillipines! I was responding to Klaus’s comment – sometimes it’s suspicious and a red flag for spam if you see comments from one country that link to a product/service in a completely different country because it appears as if that person is getting paid to bombard dofollow blogs with links. That’s all! This tactic can happen in any country of course, but that was just the example given. I’m terribly sorry if you took that the wrong way, it wasn’t my intention.
Um, yeah – Filipinos and outsourcing go hand in hand. The profit margins are really high, since the cost of living is so low – sadly there are a lot of spammy outsourced jobs available that pay their bills.
(Speaking as a Filipino American.) It’s an unfortunate gold mine for both concerned (the Philippines / their clients) and has painted the P.I. as the spammy place to be. The other contributing factor is the grasp of the English lingo – with Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay (I forget how to spell that – is that right?) – military installations of the US military – that was inevitable….
Anyway, someone else has already mentioned it but I’ll reiterate: the best combination is Akismet and GASP – it literally killed 97% of my spam. I had to take off GASP because if you DON’T have Thesis theme (like Tia here), then your readers don’t get the nice, “Um, you forgot to confirm you aren’t a spammer..” message.
The end result is that on my blog, even I would write comments that would get erased, because the “Confirm you are NOT a Spammer” box was too low on my theme. It angered the villagers…
Great post, Jill – try GASP if you’re on WordPress, you’ll love that thing.
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