Preventing Blog Spam

[critter]

Happy New Years Everyone!

I like many began running some blogs in cordination with many of the sites I manage, to help the SEO efforts in many ways.

A few months later, the blogs are beginning to grow, gaining more popularity and also more traffic. With the added traffic comes some concerns, including BLOG spam being on its way.

Further to this is the fact that I do think I should be adhering to certain guidelines with my blogs, which I may not be doing until now. The blogs up until now have contained mostly articles, news and information about the topic at hand. The articles are highly targeted and contain very few messy links to other useless sites.

Now up until now, I have never been concerned with blog spam. I do not however want any spam and am looking for some advice/guidance from some of those blog experts (Rand, Jim, Search Engine Journal, DazzlinDonnaetc..) to maybe just provide a website or some resources where I can read about combatting and preventing blog spam.

Cheers

Critter

[Carlos Chacón]

....Now up until now, I have never been concerned with blog spam. I do not however want any spam and am looking for some advice/guidance from some of those blog experts (Rand, Jim, Search Engine Journal, DazzlinDonnaetc..) to maybe just provide a website or some resources where I can read about combatting and preventing blog spam.

Cheers

Critter
I’m not an expertise on this matter, but I’ve found some good info here http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

Hope its helps you.
;)

[ssjothun]

I use the Akismet WordPress plug-in on seobomb.com, and it works like a charm, so if you use WP, I highly recommend installing that module.

Using rel="nofollow" does not get rid of the spam, it just makes is less attractive for some one to spam your blog. However, I don't think the spam bots care too much about that. Installing the Akismet plug-in blocks the spam and keeps it spam free 99% of the time.

[rogerd]

I put all my blogs on premoderation of comments. I do get occasional spam posts, but it takes only a few seconds to nuke them and they are never published. Presumably, the fact that at least some of these posts are "probes" means that my blogs don't get further spam from a portion of the spammers.

[Chris Boggs]

Found a great article on this subject while catching up on "old news" this weekend. It's actually from last Sunday's (1/15-2006) Baltimore Sun, written by Troy McCullough. Should be available here (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bal-id.blog15jan15,0,6503033.column).

What I really am interested in, since I do not really have a popular blog (yet :p), is if anyone “more technical” would care to look at the Splog Detection method that Troy refers to at http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/269, and comment on the study, which although dated 2003, is being presented at Stanford this spring.

I look forward to hear your thoughts on this.

[rogerd]

You had me going there, Chris. I was partway into Secure sensor networks for perimeter protection (and totally lost!) when I realized there was an error in the URL - here's the splog paper: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/269 :)

The OP's question was about inbound blog spam, i.e., spam comments in his blog, but splogs are an equally important problem, mostly because they can clog up search results and make good results hard to find.

I can't really comment on how effective the strategies for splog identification described in the paper are, but I'd assume the blog search engines are trying a variety of approaches to ferret out the junk blogs. I hope they succeed - as a frequent blog searcher, I find it very frustrating when a large portion of the results for a search are splogs.

[Chris Boggs]

thanks rogerd! :o shows how far I read into it before posting! :p I have changed the link in my original post.

Thanks also for clarifying the difference between Spam and Splogs, a word that was new to me when I read the article. :)

[dazzlindonna]

Critter, it really depends upon which blog software you are using. As mentioned Akismet for WordPress works really well, and moderating comments works too of course. But the easiest way to find out how is to search for something like "wordpress spam plugin" (substituting wordpress for whatever blog system you are using).

[Chris Boggs]

So would the repeated content found in many of these results (http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&utm_source=AdWords&utm_campaign=us-ha-en-blogsearch&utm_term=blog+search&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=googleblogsearch&q=%22chris+boggs%22&filter=0&sa=N&start=30) be considered splogs? Could these ever hurt (in the sense of seeming like blog spam) in your opinion if found for a company such as this example (http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&utm_source=AdWords&utm_campaign=us-ha-en-blogsearch&utm_term=blog+search&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=googleblogsearch&q=%22g3+group%22&btnG=Search+Blogs), where someone keeps posting the company description? (see especially the last 5 or 6 results which are the same content posted each week) Is this more like blog spam or are these MSN Spaces blogs actually "splogs?"

I feel this may be worth starting its own thread, but perhaps it is related enough that we can keep it in here... I will let Rusty or David or Marcia decide. :) (added ***note Marcia I read the excellent article about splogs your referenced in this thread (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=8963))

[ssjothun]

I've been playing around with 360, MSN Spaces etc, making simple blogs with a post a week or so. These are focused on one to three key phrases each, and some of them rank insanely well - like top 5 for *very* competitive terms.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/sportsbet/ rank #1 for rose bowl betting in Yahoo, and even though I'm not gonna take credit for it cause it's an unknown competitor, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Is is spam? Provided that these blogs deliver real value to the readers, I think not. I see it more like micro sites.