The Spam fight turns to blogs….
I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?)
Anyway, since installing this combination I have NOT had trackback spam.
What brings all this to memory…. The Security Fix is talking about Microsoft’s discovery of blogspam as a problem and how many of the free services (including Google’s own blogger.com) are being exploited in MASSIVE ways to create multiple doorway pages for individual adsense users. THen comments/trackbacks are spammed to get traffic and increase domain “Pagerank”… It seems that the main point of Microsoft’s study is to make a swipe at Google’s anti-spam efforts, but….
For its part, Google suggests bloggers incorporate its “nofollow” attribute for hyperlinks in comments left by users, so that links in comments don’t get any credit when Google ranks Web sites in search results.
Of course the main thing is to net let comment spam stay, it’s a lot easier though to keep it from posting in the first place and the tools that I mentioned do that automatically. Both plugins are wordpress specific, although the Akismet API might be adaptable to other blog/cms platforms.