A blog is a fine mode of expression in today’s world. Blogs became so big in such a short time that people wonder how many people write their blog regularly…? I don’t know the number for sure and I am sure no one else does but the numbers could be hundreds of millions. There are so many blogs out there and there are so many new blogs are coming everyday that it is simply impossible to count. On the other hand so many blogs comes with so many spams. There are many ways people can spam your site. and that was exactly happening to my site. As more and more people are visiting my site, the blog is getting higher ranking everyday and more spammers are finding out and more spams are clogging my site. At first I was kind of naive about it as more and more people were commenting and it felt very self fulfilling but when in last two days more than 6000 comments came that’s when I realized that what was happening..6000 comments..? I don’t know about other people but in the middle of second month I think no other blog got so many comments.
I realized that all those 6000 comments were actually done by very few individuals using all kinds of different methods of spamming. I started to read more and more blogs about this problem and each and everyone was saying almost the same thing that those were spams. I know many of you know spam from your experience but many of you also don’t know the extent of these spammers go to use spam to get temporarily higher ranking of the search engines.
According to Wikipedia, “Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam is a form of spamdexing. (Note that blogspam has another, more common meaning, namely the post of a blogger who creates no-value-added posts to submit them to other sites.) It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.
Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.”
Wikipedia also explains further by saying..”This type of spam originally appeared in internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment, to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just “cool page”, “nice website”, or keywords of the spammed link.
In 2003, spammers began to take advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software like Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commercial web site. Jay Allen created a free plugin, called MT-BlackList,[1] for the Movable Type weblog tool (versions prior to 3.2) that attempted to alleviate this problem. Many blogging packages now have methods of preventing or reducing the effect of blog spam, although spammers have developed tools to circumvent them. Many spammers use special blog spamming tools like Trackback Submitter to bypass comment spam protection on popular blogging systems like Movable Type, WordPress, and others.
So there you go my friends..Comment Spam was the only reason for my site to get 6000 comments in 2 days. Think about it how frequently I was getting the comments. Before that comment avalanche of comments I collected about 5000 more comments and it took me almost 2 months to get those and I thought that was normal. So I did not take any precaution about it. After cleaning those 6000 comments I still have to clean almost 5000 more. This is a tedious job, and somebody got to do it…it takes a lot of my time to sort out the good comments from the bad comments. But once I fix this problem I bet with you that no comment spam will be able to go through the security I am now using.
So feel free to comment on my site and on my writing. Thank you very much for reading my blog. Hope you have learned something from my blog especially Don’t be naive..take all the security measure as much as you can if you already have a blog.