The comment spam menace seems to be exploding like a fleshy Japanese Anime monster created by government scientists that goes out of control and consumes Tokyo, or something. I’ve noticed a number of Blogger blogs complaining about it for the first time, which is rather worrying as you’d think Blogger, being a centralised service run by Google, would have some rather hefty defenses. A number of the bloggers seem quaintly confused as to why they’re getting comments pushing utterly irrelevant things. in short, it’s not personal. The spammers don’t care about you – they’re just looking to improve their ranking within Google by putting links on your site.
The deeply tragic thing about this is it doesn’t work. All centralised blogging platforms (such as Blogger, LiveJournal and Typepad) and anyone using a reasonably up-to-date version of Movable Type or WordPress have rel=”nofollow” implemented which very simply tells Google and Yahoo “I don’t necessarily trust any links in my comments so don’t give them any pagerank”. On top of this the search engines look out for patterns of link spamming and adjust accordingly. It’s utterly pointless.
And yet they’re still at it. To put things into perspective I’m currently getting hit by comment spams at least every 1-5 minutes. I’m probably getting hit even more than that since I only know about the ones that make it through the first barrier. And thanks to this deluge a few of them, maybe one or two each day, are getting all the way through to the site itself, which is fucking annoying as I thought I’d gotten that fixed.
This also means that anyone posting a link-heavy comment to my blog risks it being moderated or worse considered junk. If it’s moderated then there’s a chance I’ll find it but if it’s junked with all the spam then it’s pretty much lost for good. So don’t post link-heavy comments, or email me when you do.
Yeah I’ve gone from like one or two per day normally to like 100 in the last 24 hours. I think I’ll have to change the comments cgi again to stave them of. Cocks.
I’m one of those grumbling Blogger users: there’s a new spam tool on the block which specifically targets Blogger blogs.
I’ve been targeted recently with some trackback spam for DC Shoes. All I needed to do was to add a few more words to the spam filters and Vóila! it’s all gone.
James, it occurs to me that the people selling that spamming tool are well aware that it’s pointless due to nofollow and are hoodwinking their customers, scamming the spammers as it were. The depths of humanity here is rather mind-boggling…
The greedy are allways easy targets for the greedy to exploit.
I’ve had good luck using Tyepad, however the blogger sites I frequent have been overloaded with comment spam. One site I go to had over 20 comment spams on one post alone!