Cyber Abuse: Part 2

Cyber Abuse : Comment Spam Part 2
By Trina L.C. Schiller

What is comment spam?

Comment spam is the posting, either manually or auto style, of advertisements, or plain old nonsense, to blogs for the sole purpose of getting a trackback link.

Comment spam is not just annoying to blog publishers, but it is an irritant to search engines as well. While publishers are having to fight these parasitic spammers, by deleting their bogus comments, the search engines are needing to fight this content pollution in an effort to best serve their users. Search engines are in the business of providing information, not pages of endless crap.

The benefit to the sleeze-ball who is a comment spammer is simple... The more blogs that they can get their links on the higher and faster they can rank on Alexa and Google, Yahoo and MSN. They use someone else's legitimate content to create links back to their own stuff, and as we all know, the more people linking back to you, the better you look to the search engines. And, of course, blogs are the perfect system for this type of abuse because with each update,they ping and tell the bots to come have a look.

In an effort to help publishers and themselves, Google, Yahoo and MSN have encouraged publishers to use the no follow tag (rel="nofollow") for comment links. This tag tells the bots that the link is not to be spidered, defeating the purpose of putting it there in the first place.

This is a very nice solution for sleeze-ball trackbacks, but it still leaves the blog publishers with editing to do. Let's face it, comment spam looks ugly on site; therefore it must be removed. So, the no follow tag is only a partial solution to the problem.

Although there are not a great many tools for publishers to use to fight comment spam, there are a few to be had. If you happen to use an MT (movable type) system for your blog, you may find this site useful: http://www.blogspam.org/website.html

Some blog sites, like blogger, are encouraging publishers to use turring keys. This requires that a poster physically type in a code in order to post. If you remember, safe lists started using turring keys when safe list submitters arrived on the scene. This works fairly well at blocking autosubmitted blog spam, but does nothing to stop manual spamming.Again, the fix is not complete.

What can be done to fight comment spam? Aside from the afore mentioned tactics, not much. Google has come up with something, Google Blog Search, but I don't think it will be very popular in the long term. On the surface it will be a good thing, it will allow static webmasters to stop having to compete with blogmasters, but in reality, isolation is never a good thing.

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Trina L.C. Schiller : About the Author
http://www.trinaschiller.ws

Keywords: blog, spam, blog spam, comment spam