No One Likes Comment Spam

I started my self-hosted blog on WordPress in March, and using Akismet plugin to protect it from spam comments. Akismet is very effective in preventing or reducing the effect of blog spam, and has protected my blog from 216 spam comments already. But even then I get a few comments in my spam queue every week.

An honest comment to give a blogger some feedback or initiate a discussion is welcome by all bloggers. Our labour and time invested in writing an article gets rewarded once we have feedback from readers. I would welcome if someone visits my blog and leaves his not spam comment, and includes web address in the field of website address, but not in the comment to increase the exposure.

Spammers take advantage of a blogger’s desire to initiate a discussion on the article that he has posted. But most spammers, even if they are humans and not bots, write garbage with the hope that their comments would still get published. If their out of the context comments do get published on some blogs who are too eager to get comments, they would immediately subscribe to that blog to spam them on regular basis.

Case Study

Being a new blogger, I don’t get flooded with comments. So I prefer to moderate the comments, though that takes away from the value of an instant feedback. A fortnight back, I noticed a legitimate looking comment with suspect name that reads as follows:

The comment is in response to my article: Automated Followfriday Recommendations.

Considering that he has given so much thought in writing the comment, I also thought of exploring his thoughts further before sending his comment to trash.

He has linked the comment to an article he has published in ArticlesBase, a free online Articles Directory.

The title of the article is ‘Relationship – How To Get Him Back’.

Obviously he has given two links, one from the article and another from his author box, to a splash page which in turn links to his site – one of those never ending, keep on scrolling, single page with video, testimonials and ofcourse repeated ‘add to cart’ at discounted price immediate download buttons.

The site has a privacy statement and contact information also. But the email given on my blog is different from the one mentioned on his site. The name mentioned on his site is TW Jackson, and on ArticlesBase it is Theo. The suspect name mentioned on my blog is ‘get him back for’, obviously extracted from the title of his article to increase keywords count.

Now, let us get back to ArticlesBase. I followed the author link in the directory. Believe it or not this author has submitted 250 no-value-added articles under different categories from June 10 to June 19 with slight changes in the title and body text. I found that on a single day, he has submitted as many as 30 almost similar articles.

These irresponsible directories are hungry to accept dozens of articles from a single author on a single day. They just don’t care about the quality or motive behind such article submission.

Conclusion

It is obvious from this case study that articles submission in free articles directories in conjunction with writing comments on blog posts linking to these articles is a very effective spam tool. Then there are blogs out there that pick up articles at random from these directories without having to spend time writing a blog post. So it has a viral effect.

As responsible bloggers, we have two options:

1. If for some valid reasons, at times, we are to republish an article from a directory, we must study the content, explore the author and his external links, before publishing on our blog.
   The same way we must consider an article submitted on our site by a guest author.
2. We should never publish irrelevant and out of context comments on our blog just to impress our visitors that our articles are well received.

It is far better to request your visitors, readers, and your friends on the social media to give you feedback about your articles rather than giving the spammers the freedom of flooding your articles with spam comments.

Please, share your thoughts before you leave.