Blog comment spam

Every day I receive comments on my blogs from spammers which I delete before my readers also end up being spammed. I received the following comment which I thought I’d share.

Neat blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A theme like yours with a few simple tweeks would really make my blog shine. Please let me know where you got your theme. Thanks <link to site removed>

I see a lot of people who start a blog, share this type of comment with their readers without realising they’ve been blog spammed.

A compliment is often used to make people feel good about their blog and thus they accept the comment on their blog. I suspect a lot of those writing blogs also leave their blogs completely open for anyone to post a comment. I’m finding, at a guess, possibly up to 95 per cent of comments on blogs are spam. The aim of the comments is to either gain a greater presence in Google with links to a site, or to have people click on a link and visit the site.

 

I decided to check this comment and see how often it had been posted on blogs. To do this I chose a reasonable portion of the comment (Neat blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere?), placed quotes around this text and performed a search using Google.

For search results from Australia, there were 2,890 results returned, and for results from the web, there were 487,000 results returned.

This is just one example of blog spam. Nearly half a million blogs have been spammed with just this one message. If you think about the number of spam blog comments occurring across the internet this is a massive problem.

To avoid this issue bloggers should think about removing automatic approval of comments on their blogs and to review comments before releasing them. If bloggers make it harder for spammers this avenue won’t be attractive to spammers and this will make it easier for all bloggers.

If you think it doesn’t matter, I recently clicked on a blog spam comment which had an address to a site in Australia, this immediately redirected me to a site in India, which then immediately redirected me to a site in Russia.  I didn’t wait to see what the result was going to be but I have no doubt the intent was malicious. Blog comment spam may contain a link to malware.

If you run a blog, please consider removing automatic posting of comments.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Helping small businesses with their computers and internet presence.