Alert: A reminder to watch out for blog spam

What is blog spam?

Blog spam is when others use a blog to promote themselves. They post a comment which in some way links back to their site. It is fairly easy to spot because the comment is usually generic and doesn’t specifically relate to the post. Often it will be a compliment. For example today I received this comment on my blog.

I really like your article very much,its very informative.Thanks for the nice article.Keep posting.:)

Apart from the poor punctuation there is nothing obvious about this comment that would indicate it is anything but a compliment. It was posted by anonymous so from an owner of a blog you wouldn’t even think there was a link to anywhere. The problem is if you accept this comment it does contain a link to the advertisers site and you may potentially expose your readers to malware or even some scam.

Bloggers who leave their blogs open and accept this type of comment automatically are a concern. They may even end up harming their regular readers or those who search and end their site.

If you own a blog don’t accept blog spam. Don’t just accept a compliment because it feels good. It is usually just a trick to get past your defences. I receive quite a few of these every week and a search of the internet shows this technique has been used for many years to provide sites back to sites which are somewhere dubious. I couldn’t even guess how many millions of this type of comment has made its way onto the internet over the years.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au