A Thought on Comment Spam
Every day, thousands of blogs receive millions, if not, billions of comment spam. But why do they do it? The whole reason behind comment spam, and undesirable messages and links on the web is to attain as many links as possible and thus get the top search engine results.
There is an important difference between email and comment spam. In email spam, spammers actually want you to buy their product (and if they send 10,000 emails and 100 of them return a profit, the whole exercise is worth it for them). But with comment spam, spammers do not care whether you see their messages. These inconsiderate people waste others people’s expensive bandwidth and server space, just so that web crawlers (robots) like Google can link to them and put their link at the top of a particular search. But comment spam is useless.
Links (URLs) entered into comments are given a rel=”nofollow” attribute. What’s this? It basically tells the robots not to follow that link, and therefore not to give it a better PageRank. So that means that no matter how many unsolicited comments are entered, (on Wordpress, LiveJournal, Blogger, Live Spaces and other) they are all redundant.
Comment spam is a complete waste for everyone. Bloggers have to waste time sifting through these useless comments. They also have to pay extra for the wasted bandwidth and their blogs lose popularity as they have checkered content. Spammers also waste their time and effort due to the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Instead they should be developing useful content and products that people should not be tricked into buying. And visitors to these affected blogs have to be able to detect what’s legitimate and what’s not.
The best comment spam plugin for Wordpress, Akismet, has detected 4,230 spam comments on The Machets’ Blog. This figure increases by about 20-25 every day. And occasionally a few still manage to sneak through.
