Ways to Beat the Blog Spammers

Spamming blog?s can also be known as blog spam, comment spam and splogs. All of these are known as spamdexing. Any website that accepts and displays hyperlinks may well become a target of blog spamming.

The spamming of blogs, forums, chat rooms, etc is when comments are automatically posted that are promoting spammers sites. These comments rarely feature any text and normally just consist of the spammers link.

By doing this spammers are increasing there search engine ranking, which can result in the spammers site being listed ahead of other sites. Spammers use these chat rooms, forums, blogs, etc to post links back to their site because it is a way of getting people to visit their site and, sadly, sometimes spend money on the spammers products.

Blog spamming originates from guestbook spamming. Spammers would visit sites only to fill the sites guestbook up with numerous links taking you to their site. Guestbook?s were intended to be used by genuine visitors to the site, for them to comment on the use of the site. Spammers rarely even bother to add a comment to the various links they are posting; if they do it would simply say something like ?cool site.?

In 2003 spammers really started to take advantage of the fact they could get away with posting in blogs, forums, etc. Many blog sites and forums started to add software to try and stop the spammers, but as the technology grew so did the spammers knowledge of how to get around it. Spammers started using tools such as Trackback Submitter, which allowed spammers to get around comment spam protection.

There are certain things that site owners can do to stop spammers posting. Validation tests are a way of blocking spam comments on forums, blogs, etc. A validation test is a way of showing that an actual person is posting a comment and that the comment isn?t just being automated.

A Captcha test is like a validation test, again it makes it clear that a comment is being posted by a human and not just being automated. A captcha is a combination of numbers and letters that are embedded in an image. The combination of letters and numbers has to be entered correctly in order for your comment to be posted. Spammers are already trying to get around the captcha test, with many spam tools having text recognition built into them, this is why the numbers/letters that are embedded into the image are slightly distorted so they can?t be picked up by the text recognition. However site owners have to be careful when using a captcha test as some of them are case sensitive and with the distortion of the letters it can become difficult to recognise if the letters are in lower or upper case.

Validation tests can also put some people off posting comments because the tests can sometimes be seen as a nuisance.

When spammers post comments containing website links as a way of trying to get their site at a higher ranking in the search engines, they will be faced with the possibility of their efforts failing as many links relating to spam sites, are getting altered to that Google, amongst other search engines won?t include them in the search engine ranking at all. The way in which this is done is the link is manipulated, for example, instead of saying; Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site. The comment would be changed so that the link reads; Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.

Spam is something that the Internet could do without but will never truly get rid of. It is important that you protect your email account and website as much as you can against spammers.

Helen Cox is the web master of MySpamBin, home of all your Spam Filter needs.

Please feel free to republish this article providing this resource box remains intact with a working hyperlink to our site.