Wednesday, August 15, 2007

what is comment spam?

comment spam is spam that appears in blog comments instead of in email...

traditionally the idea behind comment spam was to add links a spamvertised (advertised by spam) site to various other sites so that a) people would follow those links and visit the spamvertised site and b) search engines like google would rank the spamvertised site higher since there were more links to it and so it would be more likely to show up on the first page of search results (basically a kind of search engine optimization scheme)...

different blogs have different means of coping with comment spam: some have a CAPTCHA, some require a moderator to approve the comment before it can appear on the blog, some use moderation after the fact (so that for a while the spam will actually appear there), some require the commenter to create an account, and some even have advanced content or IP-based filtering... not all blog owners implement anti-spam functionality for their comments, however, and no anti-spam technique is perfect so in some cases the spam still gets through...

to combat the SEO effect some (possibly most) blog platforms implemented a technique by which links in comments would be marked in such a way that search engines wouldn't count them regardless of whether they were good links or bad links...

that didn't stop comment spam either, of course - people can still follow the links and not all comment spam even has links anymore... as such blog owners still often need to use techniques like those described above to combat comment spam...

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