A Life of Spam

If you’re a website owner and run a blog, especially a blog on WordPress, I’ll bet you wish you could stop all the Spam that you keep getting. If you have ever spent any time going through your blog’s comments then you may have noticed a pattern to some of them. There’s a certain similarity to many, though they seem to come from all over the world. Well, I now know why, but bear with me for a while.

Your Website

Now I’ve put my website owners hat on, the website I set up with a blog attached to attract a lot of Traffic and hopefully sell a few of my books. A website needs traffic or it’s pointless having one. There are many ways of attracting traffic and I use content marketing, which means I write and post information to my blog to attract readers. It works, but it’s a slow process. Again, you don’t write anything you don’t get the audience.

Of late I’ve been looking at link building as another strategy to attract more traffic. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. You get other websites who have high traffic to link to your website which has low traffic. Sounds simple? Don’t believe it. Sending emails to big bloggers usually results in your email being ignored.

Spam

Of course there are agencies out there who will do the work for you, but they can charge 100s if not 1000s a month for the privileged. And then there’s the automated software approach. These packages though still expensive are usually one off payments and they claim to get a lot of traffic for you. How do they do this? Essentially a lot of them create comments and spin them, i.e., alter them subtly and then post them automatically on unsuspecting blog sites. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you SPAM!

Yep, spam in many cases is generated by people using software to add comments to a blog with no anti-spam plugin or widget. It’s actually very difficult to trawl through comments using software and I haven’t found one plugin that really works, so I’ve been doing it manually for a couple of months, which is why I’ve detected this comment pattern on posts to my blog. One such comment was someone saying “Howdy from Texas.” Thu rest of the comment was a bit odd, so I was surprised when the exact same comment arrived, but this time from Ohio. A third was from another US state. You get the picture I’m building up?

To make matters worse, Google’s robot crawler will see the links on comments you may have unwittingly approved and check them out. If the crawler deems the link as being the slightest bit dodgy, your site will no doubt be penalised.

Personally, I’ve turned off comments, which is a shame because I know some were entirely genuine. But I would rather have no comments than find my website penalised because of someone else.

Tom Kane (c) 2016

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