As I sit here chewing my lunch, some insight has come to me about “comment spam” – the sort of “great blog, have you seen my used car website” comments that, in recent years, have poisoned so many sites.
WordPress.com gives me access to “Akismet” so these things rarely if ever get through, but I still get to see them (traffic here is going up, but it is not at such a level that I cannot take time out to smell even the stinking roses) and they have become much more frequent in the last few days – as have references from those odd “aggregation” sites that you see around the web – I won’t link to one because I don’t want to give it any sort of “google juice” but if you don’t know what I mean they are sites that (unlawfully) lift whole blog posts and stick them on their site on the basis that you have written about some subject that supposedly interests the owner/publisher.
It is pretty plain to me now that the real role of these sites is to simply provide pointers to spammers about where they can go to splurge on some comment spam.
Maybe somebody should organise a campaign to pressure the hosters to take these sites down?
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2 responses to “Some insight on “comment spam””
Trying to get the sites taken down is probably going to be a losing battle. Most of them pull in your content through RSS so turning that off or just publishing a summary might help (to the detriment of legitimate readers).
It used to bother me when people copied my posts, but I finally gave up and just decided to make sure each of my posts had lots of links to my other content. If search engines give weight to these spam sites then it benefits me because I get a bunch of links with every post. If anyone ends up on the spam site, hopefully they will click on a link and end up at my blog. If search engines ignore the site, then it probably doesn’t matter.
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