derick.in

It has been over two weeks since I started this blog. One thing I have noticed over this period is the amount of traffic I am getting. So to improve my traffic, I did some experiments like directory listing and search engine listing. It got me some results also. Now that presented another problem. Spam comments posted by bots. Spam bots are scripts or programs which automatically visits your site and post some comments like “Good Post”. Some even went on to put some adult web site links in your comments. So I decided to kill those spam bots.

If you think deeply, then you will find some serious issues associated with these spam comments. Most of the sites which use spam bots are splogs (spam blogs). They want to make some money out of nothing. Here are the some implications of the spam comments which I could think of.

1. Spam blogs want backlinks from quality web sites. This will improve their visibility. But how is it possible? Most of the comments have links to the website of the commenter. Since the links does not specify anything, search engine bots will follow the link and crawl the site. These will be counted as backlinks to the spam site.
2. Spam blogs get visitors from comments. Some of the readers may follow comments and go to the spam website. They will get some visitors. Consider thousands of blogs, each providing a visitor to the spam site a day. Bots will crawl thousands of sites a day and will make millions of spam entries.
3. They spoil your content. Think of this post filled with too many comments which does not add value to the post. Some comments may be from adult sites, which may affect your search engine ranks.
4. They may affect your search engine rank. Some of these web sites may be banned by search engines. Since search engines follow the spam comments, and land in a banned site, they map penalize you for providing a backlink to those banned sites.

What is the way out?

Spam is a serious issue and nobody tolerates it. One thing you can do is to add rel=”nofollow” tag to your links. When search engines find these tags they will not follow these links. Hence your site will be shielded someway from search engine penalty. But this has two drawbacks – it will not prevent spam bots from from posting comments in your links and it will not credit a genuine comment poster with a backlink. Another option is to use service link Akismet, which will classify find spam comments and holds it from appearing in your posts until you approve it manually. But if you have thousands of visitors and hundreds of comments, then this can also be a problem. This also has the problem mentioned for the first solution. The third one is to use some verification methods to ensure that a human being is posting an entry. One option available is CAPTCHA, which will present an image to the user and ask him to enter the word in a text box. Since bots will not be able to read the text in the image file, they won’t be able to post a comment.

As I mentioned earlier, this spam became a real issue for me. So what I did was that I installed a CAPTCHA Wordpress plugin and enabled Akismet. This way I can ensure that only a human being can post a comment and if he does post a spam comment, Akismet is more likely to catch it. If you have something to add to this, please feel free to comment below. You may have to prove that you are a human being before doing that .