Blogging spam

The spamming of blogs is when comments are automatically posted that are promoting spammers sites. These comments rarely feature any text and normally just consist of the spammers link.

By doing this spammers are increasing their search engine ranking,

which can result in the spammers site being listed ahead of other sites. Spammers use these forums and blogs to post links back to their site.

There are certain things that site owners can do to stop spammers posting. Validation tests are a way of blocking spam comments on forums, blogs, etc. A validation test is a way of showing that an actual person is posting a comment and that the comment isn't just being automated.

A Captcha test is like a validation test, again it makes it clear that a comment is being posted by a human and not just being automated. A captcha is a combination of numbers and letters that are embedded in an image. The combination of letters and numbers has to be entered correctly in order for your comment to be posted. Spammers are already trying to get around the captcha test, with many spam tools having text recognition built into them, this is why the characters that are embedded into the image are slightly distorted. However, site owners have to be careful when using a captcha test as some of them are case sensitive and with the distortion of the letters it can become difficult to recognize if the letters are in lower or upper case.

Validation tests can also put some people off posting comments because the tests can sometimes be seen as a nuisance.

When spammers post comments containing website links as a way of trying to get their site at a higher ranking in the search engines, they will be faced with the possibility of their efforts failing as many links relating to spam sites, are getting altered to that Google, amongst other search engines, won't include them in the search engine ranking at all.

Spam is something that the Internet could do without but will never truly get rid of. It is important that you protect your website as much as you can against spammers.