Hardly news, but people who spam blogs, use search to look for them. So is there anything that can be done to reduce the attractiveness of a blog to spam? Have a look at this recent sample of keywords that lead to this blog, taken from Google Analytics. Spot anything?
Yup, a large fraction of the searchers are looking for the default text that WordPress drops at the bottom of an article, inviting user responses. The keywords are, of course, also skewed by the content of the blog. If I hadn’t used footwear examples in some early articles, I wouldn’t have those keywords in the searches.
The searches are also amusing, because this blog has a comment policy. Searches looking for text indicating that this is a blog that accepts user generated content, will tend to find that policy page. In turn, that means that I get a lot of flattering comments about the article… posted to the comment policy. Bit of a tell that the commenter isn’t really engaged.
What’s also interesting is where people are coming from. Mostly China, India, the US.
So, is there anything that can be done, apart from using Akismet and other despamming tools, to help reduce blogspam? Might be worth changing the text, or possibly replacing the text with a graphic, to indicate where a comment should be left. That’d reduce the search volume coming to the blog from people intent on spamming. However, that’s essentially a defence based on security through obscurity – I’m going to experiment with changing that text and see what it does to searches leading to this blog. :)
I will, of course, continue to use the comment policy page as a great detector of spam. All those people telling me how great the article is, submitting to the comment policy page, have completely signalled their lack of interest in contributing! Like all these spammy comments, mostly targeting a few choice pages:
That sample is moderately representative – about half the spam submitted, is submitted to the comment policy page.
Mike Chiasson wrote,
Wow awesome ideas Jeremy. I recently wrote a quick article about how annoying it is that autoscrapers are stealing content and ranking higher than the original writers. This is right up there with that idea. I love the idea about replacing text with an image!
Link | April 8th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi Mike – I was interested in your article. The suggestion to poison your RSS feed is interesting, but I don’t think it is right and useful. Technologically, it’s moderately easy to do. However, quite a lot of stuff reads the feed – including, if you allow it to do so, Google’s web spider, Googlebot. Additionally, WordPress blogs, especially those supported by FeedBurner, ping the search engines to come read the article. I’ve seen search engines crawl and rank articles in this blog, and the AdWordsHelpExperts blog within a few minutes. So I suspect that RSS poisoning might create more problems that it solves – or at least the “simple” mechanism looks like creating problems.
I was planning a few articles about Googlebot – the first was published just after this article, as it happens.
Link | April 9th, 2010 at 10:49 pm