Preventing Blog Comment Spam

Blog comment spam in blogs is unfortunately becoming extremely common, and as soon as your blog is indexed by Google for the first time you will likely attract plenty of spammers who want to use your blog against you by attracting Google's interest and the interest of other search engines by letting the spiders index the links they post in your blog while indexing your website. There are many possible solutions available to you to eliminate comment spam, and new technologies are being created on a fairly regular basis in an attempt to out smart the spammers. Here are some possible solutions if you are dealing with comment spam problems in your blog.

Block by Keyword -- Blocking by Keyword is the simplest form of comment spam blocking that you can employ. This method yields results which are pretty good, because what it does bans names for popular keywords which would normally be targeted at bots, such as the names of popular pharmaceutical products and casino games just to name a few. Unfortunately, spammers are consistently looking for new ways to spell their product names so that they can find sneakier ways to sell their products. For example, blocking the word "Viagra" will open up the possibility for "vi@gra", "v1agr@", "vigra" and so on. With so many interesting ways to spell these terms, it will be difficult to stay up to date with the spammers.

No Follow -- In the early part of 2005, Google made an announcement which made great changes to the power of comment spammers when it comes to blogging. Google announced that hyperlinks using the rel="nofollow" attribute would not influence the ranking of the link target when it comes to the indexing of search engines. This tag has also come to be respected by both Yahoo and MSN. This is a much easier solution to the other options available to you, and it makes improvised techniques like the one mentioned above completely irrelevant. For the most part, this technique keeps comment spammers from coming into your blog and linking back to theirs, although not everyone agrees with this tactic just yet despite the fact that it is an extremely useful tactic for bloggers.

Distributed Approach -- This is a new approach to the art of addressing blog link spamming. One of the shortcomings that has been discovered regarding link spam filters is the fact that many websites only receive a single link from each different spam campaign domain. Distributed approaches like Link Sleeve uses a process which communicates between a wide number of different server applications in order to check each potential spam URL against other recently submitted URLs all across the internet. If a threshold has been exceeded, the comment, posting or message will be deleted as a reject response. Another great distributed approach is Askimet, which uses a similar approach but relies instead upon API keys in order to assign trust nodes to determine whether or not a comment is spam. Another great approach involves Project Honey Pot which uses a vst network of traps to watch for comment spamming web robots.

Application-Specific - These anti-spam methods involve software products like Movable Type or Media Wiki, both of which have developed their own personal customized anti-spam measures, because spammers are beginning to focus more and more on these platforms. White lists and black lists are utilized in order to prevent certain internet protocol or IP addresses from posting, which prevents people from posting certain things including content which matches specific filters as well. Access control lists on a more advanced level also require various forms of specific validation before any user can contribute to the blog.

Response Tokens -- Another popular filter which is available for webmasters to use involves adding a hidden hash function or session token to the comment form. When comments are submitted, specific data is stored and compared to other data to make sure that the IP addresses are not the same. This is a particularly effective method when it comes to spammers who are spoofing their internet protocol address in a futile attempt to conceal their true identities.

Copyright Bloggeries 2005-2007. All rights reserved.