I’ve been especially annoyed at Spammers lately. Not just e-mail spam, but the irritating assortment of higher tech spam like content spam and referral spam. Since installing MTBlacklist sometime last year I’ve stopped over 18,000 content spams. That’s a lot jerks.
The other day I finally got sick of it and started moderating comments on entries older than 60 days. It doesn’t immediately stop the spam, but it does keep it from being posted on the site. I’ve also installed the nofollow plug in, which essentially makes comment spam ineffective. That doesn’t stop them though. Stupid spammers.
I’ve also been getting tons of referral spam. I don’t even know what it is, but there’s tons of it. Ain’t technology grand?
I’m not at all a fan of this “nofollow” trash. What it does is it tells Google to ignore links in blog comments and trackbacks when it is ranking phrases associated with that link.
That’s great if you have links all over your blog that aren’t trustworthy, but what if your blog comments are 100% from honest users? What if I want Google to associate the links from my comments to their respective sites when doing ranking? “nofollow” kills that idea, and makes blogs less useful to Google rankings when it gets installed.
The solution is to actually remove all comment spam from your blog so you don’t have fake comments anywhere on it. Yes, sometimes you have to keep close tabs on your comments, but it’s possible to do. I’ve done it. Other than that, closing comments is a pretty good way to go.