It was not that long ago when I started noticing spam popping up in our article comments. I was immediately infuriated. Nobody is going to use our site to help them sell member enlargements or Viagra or anything else like that. My immediate response was to set the system up so that we are emailed whenever somebody adds any new comments to the site. After about 3 months of deleting the spam immediately after it’s added, we were dropped by whoever was behind it, because they stopped completely.

It turns out that comment spamming is the latest trick for porn sites and shady online marketers. And people are not the end goal of these comments. Search engines like Google use a page ranking algorithm that is designed to take a number of factors into account when working out how to rank your site. One of the biggest elements is the number of links on other sites that link back to the site in question and the terms that are used in the links (known as Google bombing).

By using an automated script to insert comments into other peoples sites, comments that always contain links back to the site in question, they aim to trick the search engines into increase their ranking for their own product sites and thereby make more sales.

It’s a disgraceful tactic, and its going to eventually make the search engines take actions to stop it. And that will hurt everybody that runs a blog or news site that offers the ability to comment on a story.

So if you run a blog or news site with comments, either set your comments so that they must be approved before being added to the site, or use notification so that you can delete them as fast as possible. You don’t want your sites linked to these kinds of people.

You can read more about this on The Register

Regards

Franki

This article was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2004 at 3:28 am