Blog Comments - Hidden Risks

[iGuest 3]

Blog Comments

 

Anyone who runs a blog would love to see the blog posts flooded with comments, but at the same time there is a hidden risk. I found this long thread in WMW forum quite interesting.

 

How does it occur?

 

If you are new to blogging you may wonder why at times your blog posts are flooded with irrelevant comments. This is a live case which requires a citation. A new user had employed automated blog comments posting software to increase his link popularity. He managed to get as many as 3000 links within a span of just three months. His website was within the first five in Google SERPs prior to spamming.

 

Google Ban for Comments Spamming:

 

But soon he discovered that he has lost his position in Google as that site was banned for blog comments spamming. As reported by different experts, Google has NEVER condoned automated blog comment posting (spamming),so, that website is more likely to find no place in Google index anymore.

 

Hidden risks for your blog:

 

This is one side of the story in which the website was banned for comments spamming. And that is, beyond any urguement, the most deserving judjement those spammers can expect.

 

But there is another side of this story. Your blog may even be penalised for indulging in such offence.

 

Blog Spamming Detection:

 

Anyone who runs a blog should well be familiar with the comments submitted by the automated softwares, they usually look like "nice..i found this link in my RSS", or "nice website". I have seen another way of comments spamming, and that is, these spammers will quote a part of the content of that post. Such spamming is difficult to detect as you can think that someone has made a genuine comments about your posts.

 

However, in most of the cases, you can easily identify those comments because those are mostly irrelevant to the content of your post. For a new blogger, at times it becomes difficult to mercylessly delete comments that praise the blog. But one must take extreme care while moderating comments.

 

WordPress Blog Software has an excellent tool for comments moderation. By employing that you can easily detect most of the spammy comments.

 

And, if you are desparately tring to increase link popularity for your website, there are better ways of doing it than to employ a spammy software to do the tasks for you.

 

I think it is better to rely on organic growth of your link popularity, it works in the long run.

 

SearchEngineJournal.com

 

Regards,

Sid

[austiniskoge 0]

Yeah, I have seen people get their hosting dropped for this, not to mention numerous Myspace and Xanga accounts deleted for the same reason.There are always situations similar to this. It's pretty annoying...

[Arbitrary 0]

Anyone who runs a blog should well be familiar with the comments submitted by the automated softwares, they usually look like "nice..i found this link in my RSS", or "nice website". I have seen another way of comments spamming, and that is, these spammers will quote a part of the content of that post. Such spamming is difficult to detect as you can think that someone has made a genuine comments about your posts.

Really, I thought those were pingbacks? I'm kinda confused, I always thought that whenever they quote, that's supposed to be a pingback, as whenever that happens on my site, it always turns out to be a pingback.
But yeah, that is quite annoying. However, if you do keep up on your blog (aka, check it every once in a while, preferably daily), then you shouldn't have this problem. You should be able to filter out and delete the stupid spammy comments and not fall under the at-risk or even banned list at Google. If you don't keep track of your blog, you probably won't have a high PageRank at Google anyway. Moreover, even if you didn't have WordPress (though I do), I'm sure you could find a way to one of those common-spam word lists and then use those to make a script to filter out the comments with those words.

I guess it's hard to say...but I've never thought that when people say, "Nice website" it's comment spam. I usually think of comment spam as something that's related to "FREE online poker" or "FREE law services" etc. I always thought of praise as just a comment. And this is the hard part--how is any spam filtering service supposed to determine if the person who commented is a real person or a spam bot? I mean, the person behind the comment could be well-meaning and just trying to praise.

But the penalization is important to consider. No one wants to be lowered in ranking because of a risk they never knew of, especially a risk that, had they known of earlier, could've been prevented.

[iGuest 3]

Undoutedly, WP has a great tool for moderating blog comments, and one can easily modify the settings to identify spammy blog comments. This is what I do to check that.

 

1. Any comment containing url requires approval before being published.

 

I usually check, whether the url(s) contained in the comment has relevance to the topic concerned. If it does not have any relevance with the topic or if the link has no value for the visitor of my blog, it is treated as a spam.

 

2. Frequent updates in bad word filter list to prevent spammy comments being published directly.

 

It is quite common to mark few words being repeated in spam posts. So, after a careful study, I add those words in the bad word filter list.

 

3. Disabling comments section for the old posts which are receiving spammy comments.

 

 

And one more thing to say about:

 

but I've never thought that when people say, "Nice website" it's comment spam.

I consider an innocent comment like "Nice Website" as a spam, if it contains link(s) to spam website(s) and also if it has no relevance with the topic. As for example, receiving a comment like "Nice Website" on a topic on serious socio-economic issue, is very frustrating. To me, a casual comment like that is meaningless in terms of the topic concerned.