How to Benefit from Comment Spam

It happens all the time. You have your blog up and running. You're writing interesting stuff and you're even getting some attention. All of a sudden there's a flood of comments on your site. Having comments helps a blog look busier, so everyone wants to get comments.

But comment spam like:

Get Rich Quick! Visit my site at…
Want to meet girls?! Visit www…
Low cost morgages for anywon! Check out www.

Grrrrr – these aren't comments, they're unpaid ads, taking up space on your site.(*and yes, they frequently have misspellings like the third one!)

It makes your blood boil. How dare they!? What right do they have, cluttering up your comment section with their advertising!

Comments that are off-topic and blatant ads are annoying. Most comment spam is self serving claptrap that needs to be deleted, and doing so is just the cost of doing business in the blogosphere.

But lately a new breed of blog comments have started arriving at blogs all over the web. Comments like:

"Nice job – keep up the great work!"
"I really enjoyed this post and I'll be back often!"
"Wow, you really made me think. Thanks for the insight!"

Unfortunately, these comments are not from legitimate readers, but instead they're from some pharmaceutical or casino site just trying to get free links.

You see, some comment spammers have even gotten clever, writing praise and reasonable comments that a blog owner would hesitate to delete, hopeful that maybe, just maybe, they're legitimate comments. This tactic ensures that the sites get free links all around the blogosphere.

But you can turn the tables, you can use some comment spam to your advantage, and it's amazingly simple. Keep the comment, delete their link. You'll get the benefit of a good comment without the spammer profiting at your expense. I even go so far as to replace their link with "Auto-Deleted by http://www.ArticleMarketer.com" – why not make it a self-serving link in the process?

If the link was from a legitimate reader who really intends to "come back often", you'll get a note by email or a follow up comment that protests your change. When you find out it's a real person who really liked what you said, you can make the decision to put the link back.

I personally have no trouble allowing legitimate links from my blog. That's what makes the blogosphere interesting.

About the Author:
Chris Ellington
Do you have any tips and tricks to make people more successful with their blogs? Can you help.
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

Comment Spam - a Huge Problem for Word Press Blog Owners

The blogsphere is clogged with blogs about comment spam, but what exactly is comment spam? The first thing a blogger needs to establish is a clear definition. It is a form of spamindexing - in another sense, it is a form of splogging. This type of splogging hi-jacks blogs to advertise something instead of creating a fake website to promote it. The objective is to build links and increase their web page's rank.

The genius behind comment spam is impressive. Instead of creating a splog, or fake blog, a person will leave comments that includes a link to their website in other people’s blogs all across the Internet. This will raise their website's rank, and turns comment spam into another from of unsolicited junk mail.

Comment Spam is a 'white hat' SEO trick. It is not wrong, but it is not right. Google has taken the first step against comment spam by banning or penalizing both the websites and the host blog. Wordpress blogs are hardest hit because most webmasters do not install the module that prevents people from entering a link into the comment. There are default tools, but few blog owners understand how to activate them.

These unwanted and malicious comments affect a blog's rank in both the weblogs and search engines. The blog is damaged as well as the web site. Here’s how it works:

• Google bases a web page's rank on the relevance of the content to the meta keywords and title.
• Google also uses keyword anchored links and the content on the following page to establish rank. To explain this, let's say the blog is about flowers. The link in the reply uses the keywords 'make money' and leads to a website on finance. This means the blog page, and the following website will decrease in rank.

The most common perpetrators are comment spam robots. They hit every available post from a single blog. The sly spam robots pose a major problem because they leave their ad, but they also leave little comments, 'great post - keep up the good work.' This can be infuriating when attached to an editorial or something personal, like a story on spousal abuse.

There are ways of fighting back. Akismet, the spam catcher for Wordpress.com and many of their bloggers caught almost 2 million spam attempts in one day.

The first method to try is to install anti-spam plug-ins in Wordpress - and activate them. Both the Karma and Bad Word plug-ins need to be installed.

Another method involves skimming the blog, reading old posts and looking for the criminals who would violate your blogging attempts. One technique for foiling their attempts is to follow the link all the way to the affiliate site. Then, report them. Reputable companies WILL ban their affiliate link.

Little can be done for the kids who go through blogs and post comments about porn, or who simply like to swear and curse! Wordpress is working hard to stay ahead of this type of spam, though, and it is possible to update the file of abusive words.

CNet, January 9 2006, reported that comment spam is now illegal in the USA. This might have some effect, but only time will tell. Until then, use the plug-ins and stay informed.

About The Author:
Bill McRea
How do you solicit comments from your web sites reader while building an opt in email list. Answer The Commentator Not only do you ad content to your site, but our script also prevents Comment Spam. The Commentator is the solution.
Article Submitted On: October 05, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

How To Prevent Comment Spam With Google’s No Follow Attribute

Putting up and maintaining a weblog of your own could be done for free or built into your paid domain site. Either way, whatever you put up on your blog becomes accessible to practically anyone on the World Wide Web. Your blog has the potential to gain many regular followers and once-in-a-while visitors, given that you deliver content that is relevant and interesting, making it an excellent medium for advertisement or promoting products, services, or other websites relevant to its general area of discussion. Thus, it is a reason for companies paying blog owners to publish their ads on their blog sites.

What happens, though, if a certain company or enterprising individual tries to get onto your blog through the comments page with an active link to their site? That's what's called comment spam, and a business enterprise can be the least of your worries when it comes to this underhanded way of getting Google search ranks up. Enterprising entities do this not merely to promote the site to those who access that particular comments page, but more importantly to increase their ranking in search pages to that the site will stay on top of the search return page.

Another version of comment spamming involves a website owner who only copies the content of his or her site from a different website that ranks high on the Google search page. That way, this dishonest site owner doesn't have to work as hard, to promote the site and gain a considerable following. The good news is that, finding out if one's site content has been copied, has become very easy, as copy detection programs can be found online. Now, let's go back to the links problem.

Fortunately for blogs and sites that allow trackbacks and comments from others, Google has announced their development of a way to decrease the occurrence of comment spam. It's a feature known as the "nofollow" attribute, which allows site owners to add an additional attribute in the form rel="follow" to any href code active link. This added part of a href link commands Google spiders to disregard a link that leads outside of the host site. The objective of this new development is to keep those who abuse open Internet sites from reaping the benefits of their misdeed.

While distressed blog owners may rejoice at this good news, some may opt to weigh the pros and cons of this new feature. To a business owner, a positive implication of using the no follow attribute is that, he or she will be able to avoid freeloaders trying to ride on his own site's Google ranking. Google's new tag can offer you an increased control on the effect of a link posted in your site by someone else without your prior permission. This has the potential to increase the possibility of that someone moving on to trying other possibilities that will increase traffic for their website. When issuing comment spam loses its benefit, then the spammer can hopefully try other things that are potentially laden with honesty, for a change.

Also, the new development will help strengthen the notion that bloggers and site moderators must make an effort to ensure that links that lead to their site will not disappoint, and their content are beneficial to the users of that particular site hosting the link. In addition, site owners must try to focus on outstanding and read-worthy content that will have enough impact to the online community that other sites will want to provide a link to their site by their own choice.

Perhaps the only Internet users who will find this new attribute disadvantageous are those who have become accustomed to using comment spam as a means to promote their own site. However, it should instead be a challenge for them in putting up worthwhile content for their site, such that Internet users will be searching for their site by name, and not clicking on its link by accident. For best results, have the service add the nofollow attribute to links that other users themselves created, such as those within their comment, and the link attached to the name of user who wrote the comment. Other areas where the attribute can be used include visitor statistic sections, guestbooks, and referrer lists.

Among the first weblog software creators that signed up for this service are LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, and MSN Spaces. Users of these blog services and others need not do anything themselves. The free blog host only needs to keep the attribute version updated to ensure its full effect.

This concept of having better control over outgoing links isn't all new, however. Forward-thinking programmers have been able to devise ways to prevent search engine spiders from detecting outgoing links for quite a while. Yet this new Google tag gives power to the common website owner over his or her site's outgoing links.
Some may have doubts on the effectiveness of this new service. One notion is that this will not be fully efficient unless it becomes a default option for bloggers and webmasters. Perhaps it also does not help that there are skeptics, not to mention dishonest users that will try to get past this obstacle and even devise a tougher-to-beat approach to comment spamming and link campaigns.

In addition, those who do gain in search engine ranking through referral links by those who really, wholeheartedly support their site have the most to lose. The possibility of search page rankings being a thing of the past presents itself in this scenario. Then again, it would not hurt to pose a challenge to those whose sites and products have yet to gain popularity. Perhaps businesses need to make a habit of improving, and have faith that those Internet users, who know exactly what they are looking for on the web, will find them eventually and be satisfied with what they have to offer. Besides, the really great ideas are the one that stand the test of time.

About The Author:
Danny Wirken
http://www.theinternetone.net
Posted: 31-10-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Handling The Web Spamming Disease

Perhaps one of the overall discomforts that most people have to deal with today is web spamming. People who have their own blogs and sites that contain guestbooks or allow visitors to place their own comments with regards to the site content or topics being discussed. It is quite easy to spot web spamming. For one, they are in no way related or saying anything about the website content and its overall essence. Comments such as purely placing information that would want to inform other visitors on certain websites or available information on the web is a clear case of web spamming. A lot of these can be seen in blog sites, especially the ones that do not use strict moderation of the comments that are placed beforehand.

There are two common types of comment spam generation techniques, manual and automatic generation. The first one does not really need deeper evaluation since as it connotes, they are manually inputted by visitors to any website or blog site that they come across and would resort to copy and paste the pertinent information in them while using alias names or names closer or related to the information that they are spamming. The second one, the automatic comment generation spamming, automated tools scour the web looking for comment like or guest book forms that allow anyone to automatically post bogus content on them. A lot of these have been going around and web spamming has become uncontrollable today. While blog sites have developed the option of comment moderation to fight off these web spamming practices, this provides an additional load for the blogger or webmaster who maintains the site. However, more load or not, the safety from maintaining the site and retaining its essence and the people who are inclined to properly place comments that are related to the theme of the site is more important above anything else.

As with all spamming efforts, this type of spamming is not that different from the main purpose of the others. Either to create mischief or promote sites that is yearning for attention to be able to earn profits through hits and visitors. Such is the main concern of most sites today, the race towards the most number of hits to be able to establish their sites and make them more visible and searchable in the web. For the, web spamming may seem to be a good way to achieve this, but considering that it is at the expense of innocent sites that are simply up for their own rational reasons, web spamming is really something that is disheartening and despised by people.

Other webmasters resort to testing their scripting techniques to answer the challenges made by web spamming. Programming for websites are done in various ways, and while each type of methodology may have their own special way of tackling this web spamming conflict, there is no doubt that unique ways of handling this problem will altogether provide headaches to the misdemeanors of web spammers over the web. This is why people take various courses in programming, to be ready for such challenges posed by mischievous web spammers present today.

About The Author:
Judge Paul
Want to know more about Handling The Web Spamming Disease
Article Submitted On: October 11, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Link Spam - The Seedy Underbelly of Web Marketing

Link popularity has been the main technique for search engine marketers for at least the last few years. Some marketers have become so obsessed with link popularity that they have resorted to automated techniques to help them acquire one-way links. Some examples of link spam methods that are still being exploited are:

Guestbooks - In a woebegone era people placed simple scripts on their websites, with the hopes of getting feedback from their visitors. A great number of these scripts are still in existence. A web spammer will identify a guestbook because of its' footprint. Millions of these guestbooks have been abandoned and are not monitored by their owners. For this reason, automated guestbook spamming has been rampant. An interesting thing about Guestbook spam: some of them can even be spammed too death. Since many of these are old CGI scripts, they can't handle the volume of spam messages, and end up crashing. At that point the Guestbook will live on until the domain owner removes it.

Blogs - blogs became even more popular than guestbooks. they've been installed by the millions and abandoned at 90% rate. Blog software prior to 2005 had a default setting which allowed comments to be published without prior approval. It also allowed live html, so these blogs are out there still begging to be spammed and many are each day. What ends up happening is they get so many outgoing links that the page becomes a massive size, and at some point the page may even have trouble loading.

Forums - a frequent victim of webspam. Since almost all forums allow users to submit material without pre-moderation, web-spammers will attempt to post to them. The good news about Forums is that are usually not abandoned like Blogs or Guestbooks, and usually someone will come along and clean up the mess. This isn't always true, but it does happen quite a bit.

Any form on the internet that allows html is vulnerable to webspam attack. Without some sort of moderation it's impossible to ensure that malevolent html will not be inserted. if you don't pre-moderate the form, make sure you receive email notifications whenever the form is submitted. If you don't at least check the form often, it's inevitable that you'll be spammed by one of the numerous bots on spam duty.

Search engines introduced the rel nofollow tag in order to deal with the rising tide of link spam. All popular blog software comes with the nofollow in place, so the main risk of Webspam is to legacy blogs installed prior to 2005. Nofollow essentially tells the search engine that the link is untrusted. In essence it says this link was entered by a person other than the website owner, so treat it with a grain of salt. Forum software makers have also been quick to add nofollow to their core technology. The fact of the introduction of nofollow gives great insight into how much trouble search engines were having with the enormous load of link spam. Basically they threw their hands up and admitted defeat. Nofollow has had an enormous impact on Webspam, but there are still an awful lot of blogs and forums out there that haven't been patched.

Link spam appeals to certain web marketers for obvious reasons. It's a scalable and free solution to building link popularity. Web marketers who automate the process can quickly vary their anchor text between 'runs'. This will give them a wide variety of links from a broad spectrum of websites located on diverse IP addresses. This is normally a sure-fire recipe for success for virtually any website. By simulating the link popularity of a popular website, the link spammer is able to fool the search engines into assigning it higher rankings. The manipulation of link popularity has become a major issue to all of the search engines. Each will offer more and more attempts at reducing this threat, but unless search engine rankings are based only on on-page variables, it will always exist.

About the Author:
For more information on building link popularity, please visit Sootle.com
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

If You Sping A Splog You Spam Ping Your Blog (Weblog)

One of the techniques that bloggers use to announce new content on their weblog is to ping it every time they create new content or a new blog entry. A ping is a signal which is sent to a ping server to let it know that a blog has been updated and which also allows blog search engines, like Technorati, to know that there is fresh new content on your blog. One of the most popular free ping providers is pingomatic.com.

This is important to do after each post because it updates search engine databases, which, in turn, can bring more visitors to your blog (assuming that one of your goals is to have more readers of your blog). This is so because a lot of the blog search engines rank freshest (or newest) results first.

Many blogs are monetized by Google AdSense or other PPC or CPM ads and it is, therefore, in many bloggers best interest to draw as many visitors as possible to their blogs in order to earn more advertising revenue. This has led to spinging splogs. A "splog" is a "spam blog," as coined by Mark Cuban. A "sping" is a "spam ping." A sping happens when someone sends a ping even though a new post has not been created. A sping is sent to dupe blog search engines into believing your weblog posts are new and fresh even though they actually are not.

Spinging a splog is in nobody's best interest except for the spinging spammer. The internet is littered with too much spam as it is and spinging does not help the cause.

About The Author:
Tino Buntic invites you to receive free sales leads and free advertising by creating a TradePals professional profile at http://www.trade-pals.com. TradePals provides qualified sales leads to business professionals across The United States and Canada.
Tino enjoys reading blogs and one of his favorites is Ads Of The World.
Article Submitted On: October 16, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Comment Spam: Allure for the Online Totem Pole

Unless your website is dead and six feet below the virtual ground, you are ever prone to the Internet evil commonly known as comment spam. Comment spam infiltrates every active online website which supports or accepts links from users or participants.

A comment spam is generally characterized with links and no sense, understandably so since its main concern is to be able to take advantage of the algorithm techniques of most search engines in making certain websites rank higher than the others.

Senseless as a comment spam may look at the outset, the makers of these said comment spam are extremely intelligent creatures that are properly harnessing the power of the Internet and its users to generate undeserved income.

Strangely enough, the object of affection of the makers behind every comment spam is not to gain popularity from the people and websites that they are spamming, but rather they use it to get an edge in the totem pole of user access which we know to be called search engines.

Comment spam in huge volumes actually allows the culprits to generate high ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. It helps them generate more revenue from receiving more clicks and having their links displayed all over the World Wide Web for all the people to see, regardless if these people care about what they're advertising or not.

The allure of resorting to generation of a battalion of comment spam actually emanates from the fact that it works. No matter how hated spammers get for being an online pest for websites, they get to earn a lot from it. Even when the growing number of efforts to reduce comment spam is alive and kicking, a lot of people are doing it since it is a very powerful marketing ploy.

While thoroughly extinguishing comment spam may seem to be an impossible feat, there have been various ways created to diminish, if not eliminate the influx of comment spam in various online systems. One way of eliminating comment spam involves completely blocking off all comments. However, this method is very self-limiting and deprives the user the freedom for healthy online interaction. Not all comments are comment spam, and anyone who deprives himself of getting authentic feedbacks for the sake of blocking a spam comment is at a losing edge.

Some companies have already launched their own versions of anti-spam techniques for the benefit and protection of their users. Still, even with the best of the best anti-spam method, a comment spam can still find its way even in the most protected pages. But it is better to have some level of protection than none, so every user must exercise his or her right to have spam-free interactions by selectively seeking the websites which are more protected and encouraging other websites which are not entirely comment spam-protected.

Filters are also used by most systems to purge comment spam, but they need to be updated frequently since these notorious comment spam authors are extremely resourceful people with a knack for taking advantage of every online loophole they could find.

About The Author:
Kistina Robin
Get most updated information about Comment Spam: Allure For The Online Totem Pole
Posted: 02-11-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

What You Should Know About Trackback Spam

Trackback facilitates communication between blogs. When a blogger writes a new entry whether to comment on or refer to an entry found at another blog, the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a Trackback ping. The receiving blog will display summaries and links to all the commenting entries below the original entry. Trackback spam is when Trackback pings to a site that directs viewers to a totally unrelated URL.

Trackback Explained

Trackback as initially released is an open specification both as a protocol and as a feature of Movable Type 2.2. This contained the first implementation of Trackback. It has always been planned as an open system or a system that could easily be implemented in other blogging tools. This is because of the fact that the real value of Trackback can only be realized when many sites support it.

Basically, Trackback is designed to provide a method of notification between websites. This is a way of one person saying to another that "This is something you may be interested in". This can be done when a person sends a Trackback ping to the other.

Trackback is a form of remote comments where one person who wishes to comment on a post in another person's blog writes a post on his own weblog rather than posting the comment directly on the other person's weblog. The person commenting simply sends a Trackback ping to notify the other. Of course, this is only possible when both blogging tools support the Trackback protocol.

Trackback is likewise a form of content aggregation. When a person writes a post on a topic that a group of people are interested in, he/she sends a Trackback ping to a central server whereby all visitors can read all posts about the topic. Anyone interested in reading about a specific topic could look at the site to continue being updated on what bloggers have to say about it.

Blogging software that supports the Trackback protocol displays a "Trackback URL" along with every entry. This URL is used by the commenting blogger to send XML-formatted information about the new entry to this URL through his/her software. There are some blogging tools that are able to discover this Trackback URL automatically while others require the manual entry by the commenting blogger.

The protocol of Trackback is based on the principle of initiating the connection when sharing of information is desired rather than waiting for this same information to be discovered by other websites. Sites can communicate about related resources and are able to accomplish the automatic listing of all sites that have referenced a particular post. The ping also provides a firm, explicit link between entries as opposed to an implicit link that depends upon outside action.

Trackback is particularly useful in finding out whether other people are thinking well enough about what a person has written on a weblog to actually link to it. However, allowing Trackback links will require more site maintenance to remove Trackback links that are no longer valid. The capability of listing anyone who has placed a link to a site on one's blog can be abused by spammers.

Trackback Spam

The flood of Trackback initiated by spammers can put a strain on server resources. The amount of Trackback spam that a site is getting may be seen by clicking on "Trackbacks" from the main blog menu and select "Junk Trackbacks". The repeated pinging of one's server even at hundreds of times an hour by spammers can cause server CPU overloads and crashes and can result to having the web host shut down the affected account.

There are some defensive measures that can be taken, one is to moderate all Trackbacks. The MT 3.2 allows for approval of all Trackbacks before being posted to a site. Closely related to this is the limiting of unnecessary Trackback usage. Trackbacks are pointless when no one tracks a site back. Not everything needs to be "Trackbackable" so prudence in determining the difference is required. This move is all about giving the spammers less opportunities to play at one's expense.

The use of the powerful anti-spam Movable Type Plugin called Spam Lookup is another option. Being hit by a flood of Trackback spams can be stopped by looking for the common unwanted words or specific strings to block. Spam Lookup uses PERL Regular Expressions thus by adding a few characters to the keywords; more flexibility in what is being blocked is attained.

Spam Lookup can be configured at the blog or installation level. Configuring at the installation level is suitable for those who have just one blog or want any setting to apply across all the blogs on one's installation of Movable Type. When settings are intended only to apply to one blog, one can configure Spam Lookup using the Plugins Tab of the Settings Item on the weblog menu.

The plugin has three options in its anti-spam arsenal. It looks up the source IP address of the comment or Trackback and compares it with several centralized blacklist servers. There is an option to force moderation of the comment and adjust its junk status when the IP address is found on the blacklist server. It also looks up the domain names of the posted links. The plugin is likewise able to compare the IP of the source URL of the Trackback with the IP it was sent from. The blog software sending the ping is usually on the same server as the blog itself. Most spams are sent from zombie machines and not from the website thus this sort of spam can be detected.

Link settings are also looked into. A comment that has no links is unlikely to be spam as blog spams generally aim to link to a dodgy site to improve its rankings in search engines. Any comment or Trackback that has more than a certain number of links shall be forcibly moderated.

The keyword filter setting act upon keywords in comments and will replicate some functionality of MT-Blacklist. This is an incredibly powerful feature except that the plugin, by default hardly has any keywords in it. The WordPress Wiki is a good place to find a list that can be pasted in.

The Trackback validator plugin for WordPress performs a simple but very effective test on all Trackbacks in order to stop spam. The plugin retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the Trackback when one is received. The Trackback is approved when the page contains a link to one's weblog. If the page does not link, the Trackback is flagged as spam and rejected. Since Trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the weblogs they attack, this test would quickly reveal illegitimate Trackbacks.

About The Author:
Danny Wirken
http://www.theinternetone.net
Posted: 03-11-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Strategies for Preventing Comment Spam

Bloggers are painfully aware of website owners who try to improve their website's rank by adding links to blogs. There are several strategies for combating this problem. The first and most obvious method is to avoid free blogger sites. These are favorite targets for comment spam.

Bloggers who own their own software can add a no-follow tag. The rel=nofollow tag does not stop the spam, but it does stop robots from following the link. Blogger, owned by Google, implements these tags already. Wordpress has anti-comment spam plug-ins to help bloggers stop comment spam.

Do not bother banning the IP address - unplugging a computer for one hour can change the IP address, and changing a server's IP address is relatively easy. Some companies buy IP addresses in blocks of a hundred or more, and spammers also use open proxies. These are IP addresses that allow anyone access.

Configuring a blog to prevent javascript and HTML code in replies is a solid and easy to implement method of attacking comment spam. It is possible to configure some blog software programs to automatically convert any string that starts with http:// into a url. This will not stop manual comment spams, but it will stop the crawlers.

The spam crawlers search the web looking for descriptive form names. Field names like 'comment' or 'reply' make it too easy for comment spam crawlers to find a potential victim.

Many blogs are using CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). This new tool requires the user to post a text and number combination before their post is published. However, a simple trip to the freelance bidding forums already indicates that countries (Ukraine and India are the most obvious) are hiring people to do nothing but post comments all day. This undermines CAPTCHA tools anyway!

There are two other methods that are available to most bloggers. The first is user authentication - this requires the person to sign up for a user name and password before publishing a post. This slows down comment spammers in two ways: (1) they must take an extra step before publishing, and (2) most authentication programs are configured to accept an email address once.

The second method is to moderate every post before it is published, but the sheer time involved can be daunting. However, the advantages of having 100% control over your blog's content can tip the scales in the favor of moderating. Many posts do not use relative keywords, or post irrelevant comments based on an emotional reaction to the information. Moderating the blog allows the blog owner total control over the information on their page.

About The Author:
Bill McRea
How do you solicit comments from your web sites reader while building an opt in email list. Answer The Commentator Not only do you ad content to your site, but our script also prevents Comment Spam. The Commentator is the solution.
Article Submitted On: October 05, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Blog Spamming

The phenomenal spread of the Internet all over the world has led to countless innovations and practices. In the recent years, another phenomenon has risen to the top of the things to do list on the Internet – blogging. Relatively unknown several years ago, blogging is now one of most common activities online. It is derived from the root word blog, which is actually short for web log – an online diary of sorts. Then there is spamming. Spam, in the broad sense of the word, simply means anything that is junk. E-mails and other information that is repeated and essentially irrelevant are considered spam. Put blog and spam together and you have blog spams.

What exactly is a blog spam? A blog spam is simply a blog that does not have much in form of content. A blog spam exists merely to drive traffic to certain sites. It is in fact used by many people as a SEO technique. Blog spamming is not acceptable to a wide range of sectors. With the main aim of generating traffic, blog spams do not really contribute anything relevant. They exist to provide links to their parent websites and nothing else.

How do you spam blogs? As already discussed above, blogs are normally used to publish information related to website content. Thus content is the most important thing. For blog spams, however, no such importance is placed on content. Thus blog spams may contain just about anything! To increase traffic to the parent website, blog spams are normally filled with only links or classifieds (which actually point to another site). Another aspect of spam blogging is the comment feature. Programs are created to post spam as comments in different blogs. This has become an irritant because spam posted as comments are generally unrelated to the blog topic.

Of course, many legitimate blog hosts condemn spam blogging and are coming up with ways to prevent spam blogging. One of these is through the image verification process where the person posting a comment has to enter a security code before the comment is published. Another one is trough comment moderation options made available in some blogs. Companies which host free blogs are the worst hit by blog spams. However, despite the efforts of these companies to counter blog spamming, unscrupulous individuals somehow still find ways to spam blogs. Maybe this is due largely to the fact that the Internet is a fast evolving technology, and what may work now may not do so the next day. But the best thing you can do is this: provide great content and you will find that there is no need for blog spamming.

About The Author:
Kistina Robin
Find most recent articles at Blog Spam.
Article Submitted On: October 07, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Trackback Spam Explained

In most blog applications, there is a feature called Trackback, which allows the user to send a trackback or notification to a different site or another blog that the user referred to in his own blog. Its main purpose is to notify another site or weblog that you are talking about that site or weblog or its contents in your own weblog. Blog applications WordPress and Movable Type, to name a few, have this facility. When the blog's owner receives the notification through his or her blogging software, the said software will display the pertinent part of your blog post in their website's comments section.

We might all have experienced receiving tons of spam email, and more recently, many bloggers have received blog comment spam through their personal sites. Trackback spam, on the other hand, is yet another underhanded means of some Internet users and Web-based entrepreneurs to promote their business, and consequently gain income. Moreover, this is what they do to establish links to their own sites on other websites, in order to move their sites up in page rankings of Google search engine. Essentially, trackback spam are bogus trackbacks, a false notification that someone actually posted on their blog about a post on your blog, in hopes of having your blogging software show it on your blog site.

With more and more people cashing in on Internet technology, trackback spamming has been on the rise, with some blogs receiving hundreds of trackback spam everyday. In order to avoid being tracked down, trackback spammers use botnets of different computers to distribute their trackback spam, while none of those computers host the exact domains promoted in any of the trackback notifications. In effect, the IP address of the domain that appears in the trackback is different from the IP address of the specific computer that distributed the trackback notification.

A basic thing to have in order to avoid trackback spam is a solid comments policy for your site. Basically, you want to still be able to receive and host comments without giving in to those who may want to try to ride on your site's readership. Moderate the comments and trackbacks that your site receives on a regular basis, so that only the genuine ones get to be viewed by your site's followers. Some guideline questions in moderating trackbacks on your own are: Is it relevant to the post or the blog in general? Does it help in stirring reader discussion? Is it decently written and not worded offensively? Does it add to the topic and/or clear up misunderstanding? If the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes, then the trackback in question should probably stay. Of course, the choice of allowing any kind of comment or trackback to appear on your blog is entirely yours, being the blog owner. Still, you probably don't want anonymous spammers messing up your blog with misleading trackbacks.

Fortunately for the common blog user, blog software creators, such as Movable Type and WordPress, have developed advanced but easy ways to prevent trackback spam from winning the game. In MT, for instance, you can control the comments and trackback settings in such a way that trackback spam displaying sites from the same webhost domain can all be blocked. For example, separate trackback spam showing active links of http://pay.soiledshirt.com and http://bid.soiledshirt.com can both be blocked by including http://soiledshirt.com in the blocking list.

Meanwhile, in WordPress, trackbacks go through quite a handful of filters so that trackback spam is blocked. Using anti-spam technology developed by Google, WordPress is programmed in such a way that trackback spam are put up on the blogs with all included links are given the "nofollow" tag. This is done by the system automatically, and no input is required from the WordPress user for his or her blog to have this function. In effect, a trackback link has no bearing on a website's Page Rank score, because the search engine will sidestep each link that has the nofollow tag.

Perhaps a most valued means of blocking trackback spam is to check, or have your blog system check, if the notification's corresponding domain IP location does not correspond to the IP address of the computer that sent out the notification in actuality. In MT, the user can opt to use this method of moderating spam automatically by accessing its plugins page, clicking on SpamLookup, and then Show Settings page. On this area, find Advanced Trackback Lookups, and select the option to "Junk trackbacks from suspicious sources".

As to the matter of stopping the problem right at the source, not all may know that some companies actually make a living on offering generating trackbacks and comment spam as a service. Those who do have voiced out their concerns, and as such have publicly criticized the nature of such services. Some creative minds have had the courage to demonstrate online that even paying for this kind of service, discounting all trackback restrictions does nothing but damage to a company's business. Because blog software developers are getting better at protecting their users from unwanted backlinks and comments, those companies buying trackbacks are just wasting money. This seems to be a promising means of preventing any more trackback spam activity, because businesses owners are reminded that there are better ways to spend their money than buying spam backlinks and comments.

The alarming thing about this trackback spam activity is that more software and services for preventing trackbacks are being generated and made available for a price, outside of the more popular blog software developers. As it may happen with viruses and virus detectors, is it not possible that the best solutions come from the root of the problem, or the propagators of spam, themselves? If it is, then it is also possible that the profit from these solutions go to the spammers themselves. In any case, as long as spamming propagates, bloggers will need to take precautions, and blogging software developers need to take heed, lest every blogging experience becomes bad for everyone.

About The Author:
Danny Wirken
http://www.theinternetone.net
Posted: 04-11-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com