Comments on: Mashable & Daily Telegraph UGC Spam May Invite Trouble Too

By: Shaun Foulds

Shaun Foulds — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:39:59 +0000

Thank you for addressing these issues. I have recently set up a Wordpress blog and am inundated with spammers leaving 20+ comments at a time which is causing me a lot of frustration. My blog is a wedding Video site and has nothing to do with 90% of the meaningless comments posted on there. I have had to learn how to deal with them fast before they devalue my blog.

The info you have kindly provided on this site is exactly what I needed. Thanks so much

By: Shaun Anderson (Hobo)

Shaun Anderson (Hobo) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:53:48 +0000

@Kate – close old posts like I do and you nuke your spam.

By: David

David — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:21:39 +0000

How neat – thank you for the showing the technique of using the modifier of “siteURL/ desired keyword”

Is there a repository of search tricks like that one that you could point me to?

By: Kate

Kate — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:10:57 +0000

We use Akismet for our comments and in addition we manually check them all. The problem is that most of the spam is automatically generated, so they can send it over and over again. Sometimes innocent people end up in a junk box, but I user generated content is still very valuable and I think it will be unreasonable to switch off at all.

By: Shaun Anderson (Hobo)

Shaun Anderson (Hobo) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:41:43 +0000

Nice one

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:31:38 +0000

I agree with you Shaun – moderation isn’t difficult, and it works. We have a phpBB Forum (http://www.pimlico-flats.co.uk/forum/ if anyone wants to come & join in, a number of eBay, & eCommerce members, not just renting flats, anyway enough of that) and we have a dedicated member who wakes up early every morning and cleans the board of the spam. No one else ever sees it.

Another technique we use is to regularly delete members who haven’t posted. Spammers use Bots to set up accounts, which then wait before spamming, we get pre-emptive.

Another technique is to edit the spam, replacing their links with our own adsense! Hehehe

Interestingly after having edited a spam to point out that 1 post might be acceptable, but 40 weren’t, we started getting single post spam. So the spam isn’t as automated as you would think.

Can I interest anyone in a London Flat over Christmas or New Year – only Â£600/week?

By: Alok

Alok — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:16:16 +0000

Using the spammy keywords itself on your site/post/comment is enough for google to raise its eyebrows or when it is getting linked to questionable sites.

By: Shaun Anderson (Hobo)

Shaun Anderson (Hobo) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:27:40 +0000

Richard – Of course. I still think the single best way to combat comment spam is to simply moderate comments. Easy stuff.

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:27:57 +0000

Nice catch on the Telegraph article. Be quite interesting to see just how long that page keeps its comments. Of course, they *could* choose not to show comments to Googlebot