Be On The Alert For Spammers Stalking Your Blog Web Site

Digital spam is a hyperlink between pages without real merit. Writers try to link back to their sites by placing a link on another site. Spam is definitely frowned upon by Web site owners. It is also considered black hat technique and even penalized when caught by search engines. Sometimes spam does not appear to be spam, so be on guard.

One main purposes of spam is to take advantage of search engine formulas, called algorithms, that rank Web sites. These mathematical formulas give higher rankings to websites when they have other websites link to them that are ranked higher than they are. The more links the better your rankings, especially when those links come from higher rated sites.

Another reason is to lure visitors with hope some may purchase their products. There are many spammers since there is relatively low cost in operating and difficult to hold anybody accountable.

Spammers seek out sites accepting comments from visitors and allowing links back to the visitor's site. These most typically are blogs, forums, wikis, guest books, directories, etc. They enter comments and email addresses. This may be manually or via automated software. Links are either in the WEB site section, comments section or both. Sometimes there are numerous links in the comments section.

Defensive tools are available to help prevent spammers from taking hold of your site. You should become familiar with these tools and use them to help thwart spammers while keeping you in the good graces of search engines. There are also services that attempt to filter spam comments automatically.

I am most familiar with Akismet and Captcha. I was introduced to Akismet though WordPress.com and blogging. It is offered free with all WordPress.com blogs. The filter works by combining information on participating blogs about captured spam. They formulate rules and use these rules to block future spam. It is very effective but spammers still find ways around it which is why a blog owner should always moderate and approve all comments.

A Captcha is a test used to validate the response is not generated by a computer. The process uses one computer to ask the user to complete a simple test like entering randomly generated letters, digits or both. A human should be able to enter a correct answer. However, the generated letters and numbers appear as a distorted image which cannot be read by another computer. There are other spam filtering services available.

I received notice of a recent spam comment on a blog I administer and sometimes ghost write. The comment read: "Wow neat! This is a really great site! I am wondering if anyone else has come across something similar in the past? Keep up the great work!"

This was not a compliment once I looked deeper, but rather spam. The link site was to a gay sex site and thus totally unrelated to party planning blog for weddings and mitzvah events. I recognized that from the signature. The bait was also totally unrelated to the blog post. In fact the link was poorly written and led to an error page.

You should always make use of a service to filter out spammers before they infiltrate your turf.