Comment Spam

Basically it's when some money-grubber ads a comment to a blog entry that has nothing to do with the entry, but just includes a lot of links to spam sites. The idea is that when google scans the blog, it will see all those links, and thus rank those sites as more important. (The number of links to a site is one criterion Google and other search engines use to determine how a page ranks in their search results.)

Needless to say, I deleted the comment. I doubt I was the only one hit, either, but since most people who blog at WOU have comment moderation turned on, it's unlikely that any of the others got through.

We need to get the Nofollow plugin configured on our blog server; it adds a special flag to all links in comments telling the Google scan to ignore them, thus denying their benefit to spammers. Hopefully that will make them stop showing up.

It's hard to describe how much spammers annoy me without language I don't want to use in public. It's also annoying that some people actually buy stuff that's advertised in spam. That's why the spammers keep doing what they do; because it makes them money. I hope none of you have ever sent money to a spammer, because if you have, you've helped make the lives of everyone on the 'Net just a bit more annoying.

Anyway, I'm on vacation and don't want to get all riled up, so I'll end here.