There are 213 comments in your spam queue right now

screenshot of four examples of typical comments in the spam queue for my blog

Comments in your spam queue

It’s usually nice for people to notice you. But when the attention comes from blog content spammers, you may feel a little differently. The growth of pageviews of this blog (currently about five million per year) has coincided with an ever-increasing volume of comment spam, those irritating blog comments that promise you $79/hour working from home!, Dior fashions at low prices!, and the best lawyer in Podunk!

Currently, I’m receiving over 250 comments like these a day. So, I’m happy to pay Akismet for their Pro Blogger service which almost perfectly throws them into a spam folder. I say “almost perfectly”, because Akismet doesn’t handle a rarer form of comment spam, trackback spam. Trackback spam adds links to your content onto a page spammers want people to visit. Trackbacks can be useful to see who is linking to your content, so I don’t want to ignore every trackback link. Unfortunately, this means that you have to look at every trackback and manually move spam comments to the spam queue, an irritating multi-step procedure in WordPress. I started seeing increasing quantities of trackback spam over the last few months, so I’ve added a plugin Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker that seems to be doing a good job automatically moving trackback spam to the spam queue.

One more observation. Bloggers like me have to spend time and money keeping this crud off their posts. But there’s another victim of these sleazy attempts to plaster low-quality SEO slime over the internet. I notice lots of spam links to small obscure businesses. I wonder how many of them are being fleeced by jerks who promise to increase traffic to their website. And the business owners never know that the fleecer is spraying comment spam to make those stats rise.

One thought on “There are 213 comments in your spam queue right now

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *