Are comment spammers getting anywhere?
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After deleting the daily dose of spam from my blog earlier, I got to thinking… Between the spam filters, nofollow links and site administrators defending their blogs, is any of it getting through?
Over the years I’ve visited hundreds of blogs, if not more, and only 2-3 occasions come to mind where an obviously spammed comment is actually displayed on a site. Just about everyone has spam protection or filters or some sort on their site, WordPress has shipped with one for quite some time now. At the least, comment spam is immediately recognisable in 99% of cases and easily dealt with.
The only place I can imagine said comments getting through to is the occasional abandoned site, which due to that very fact are less likely to be found. And when found any link left obviously won’t carry much weight from and SEO point of view.
I realise the majority of spam is automated bots, software etc. though initial set up is obviously required, and presumably some amount of ongoing work as well. However little the effort may be, with the absolute minimal amount of comments that get through, it would seem that doing just about anything else would be more productive.
What do you think?
If you’ve worked closely on combating spam in one way or another, or have any figures on the “miss” rate of filters etc. I’d be curious to know. Image credit.
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I have often wondered why do they bother, 99% of it doesn’t get through. And is the 1% of it that does get through worth all the effort they go to?
Rob,
I would think even 1% would be high. The more I think about it the more I think it can’t possibly be worth the effort.
Though its not effective, still there are plenty of em! Moderation is the best to kill span comments.
You should not trust Akismet blindly as there are still some smart spammers which tricks this plugin on unmoderated blogs :P
Ajinkya,
Of course, Akismet just means I have to screen 1-2 comment a day that make it through, instead of 100.
Its just like spam, they sent out millions and the small amount that gets clicked on makes them money. Akismet is only a filter, it doesn’t prevent spam. There are ways to prevent a lot of spam and not just with captchas either.
Hi Jive,
I realise that, I suppose my thought is that you could create a few pages of quality content that would organically drive target visitors to your site, which would in turn convert that 1 in 10,000 conversion rate into 1 in 500 for clickthroughs and wouldn’t require the constant bombardment of people.
I’d rather have a handful of targeted visitors than a tonne of duped ones any day.
Unfortunately, spam commenting is a lot easier than creating content, and it’s all a numbers game (just like spam email – as mentioned by Jive).
Spammers are really only after 2 things – links for SEO purposes or drive-by traffic.
There are hundreds of millions blog, which translates into billions of possible pages to get a link from. I’d say 70 to 90% of those are abandoned or not maintained/written by a human.
Spammers automate everything they do and the comment spamming is only one aspect of the whole process of promoting their thousands of auto-generated sites (blogs) etc… And because Google catches them at some point, they’ve got to constantly maintain “the pressure”