Is Your Blog Attracting Too Much Spam?
First off, congratulations! Your blog is being found on the internet!
Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamming. (Note that blog spam has another, more common meaning, namely the post of a blogger who creates no-value-added posts to submit them to other sites.) It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.
This type of spam originally appeared in internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment, to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just “cool page”, “nice website”, or keywords of the spammed link. In 2003, spammers began to take advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commercial web site. Many blogging packages now have methods of preventing or reducing the effect of blog spam, although spammers have developed tools to circumvent them. Many spammers use special blog spamming tools like trackback submitter to bypass comment spam protection on popular blogging systems like Movable Type, WordPress, and others.
A trackback is an acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is sent via a network signal (ping) from the originating site to the receiving site. The receptor often publishes a link back to the originator indicating its worthiness. Trackback requires both sites to be trackback-enabled in order to establish this communication. Trackbacks are used primarily to facilitate communication between blogs; if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.
Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs. This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too much of a burden.
But how do you get rid of them… Ah, now you wouldn’t expect us to give away all our secrets, would you?
Tags: blog spam, wordpress spam
