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Subtitle:  Spam Justifies My Online Existence

Yesterday, Latino Rebranded received its first comment spam…and I’ve been waiting for that to happen.

You see, in some twisted and almost ironic dark side of a blog’s importance or popularity, there is invariably an influx of ‘comment spam’ along with legitimate audience contributions.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jumping for joy but am reluctantly accepting the challenge.

What is Comment Spam?

“Comments are a great way for webmasters to build community and readership. Unfortunately, they’re often abused by spammers and nogoodniks, many of whom use scripts or other software to generate and post spam. If you’ve ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you’ve encountered comment spam.” - Google, Webmaster Central

Some Ways To Combat Comment Spam

• Turn on Comment moderation – Comments won’t appear on your site until you approve it.  Upside is you get to approve all comments; downside is visitor must wait until you approve comment, also imagine what happens if you have to go through hundreds of comments on a daily basis.
• Use “nofollow” tags – Basically, tells search engines not to include comments in their calculations for page ranking.  Doesn’t help with spam, but helps with search engine permission.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments – Many spammers use hyperlinks to directly link to their site either to have people click through or serve as attribution to their own site ranking.
• Disallow anonymous comments – Most likely, you want to know who your audience is anyway.
• Turn off comments after a specified time period passes - From experience this helps.
• Turn off comments – drastic, but most effective.

Comment spam were a plague with my old blog that proved to be a challenge for a good 6 years – there were hundreds even thousands of comments with the most notorious of key spam words.  Fortunately, blogging platforms and the communities that add value to them have improved in anti-spam technology.  There’s actually an industry built around it – Akismet is one such example, which I may try.

For now, I’m staring at a little ’1′ encircled within an orange circle next to the Comments link in my WordPress dashboard which denotes the new comment spam, and I’m bemoaning the next step.  But…onward.

I hope this helps or at the very least prepares some future blogging stars out there.  There are some other methods of combating comment, I am sure.  What’s yours?

UPDATE 02.24.2010: I dug a little deeper and contacted Akismet to provide some data.  Below is a snapshot of the current state of comment spam each year – notice the blue ‘ham’ area:

Here’s another graph of yearly compounding comment spam:

Spam anyone?!?

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