SPAM it’s even in the blog world

Well spam is annoying, or at least it used to be, back in the day before we had junk mail folders and learn’t not to hand out our e-mail addresses to every website we visited. But now I don’t have an issue with e-mail spam as it rarely makes it past my defences – in fact there’s more chance of an e-mail I want to receive being found in my junk mail until I mark it as safe.

BUT unfortunately Spam has found a new way to annoy me, on my blog. I have recently come under attack from what I understand to be ‘Spam Bots’ these pesky pieces of code search out blogs and post comments on their posts generating links back to their blog. Now some of these have been good enough to fool me, some I have allowed as the blog I’m linking to is ok in my eyes, but below is an example of a comment I had from a blog entitled – how I lost 30 pounds.

I was just now searching around about this when I came upon your blog post. I’m simply visiting to say that I truly enjoyed reading this post, it’s very clear and well written. Are you thinking of posting more about this? It looks like there’s more material here for future posts.

Now it actualy seems like quite a genuine post until you see the post it related to and if you don’t believe be here’s a link to the actual post! (click here)

So I’ve signed up to technorati and am in the process of ‘claiming’ my blog, I need to verify that I own the blog by including the below hyperlink. I’ll fill you in on technorati later though as I’m busy verifying!

Now how relevant does the comment seem?

And what’s even more annoying about this is that I downloaded and installed a plugin to protect against spam (invisible defender) which doesn’t seem to be be doing anything, or maybe I’m mistaken and these are genuine comments, if so I hope they continue but we’ll have to wait and see.

The only sure fire way I have of avoiding the success of spam bots is to monitor your comments and ensure that they are only published when you approve them, after all links to websites or blogs with a negative score in the eyes of Search engines can actually have a negative effect on your own blog!