blogging

I get more than 23 spam com­ments here for each legit­i­mate one. Spam fil­ters catch most of them, but occa­sion­ally one slips through and I have to delete it man­u­ally. And once in awhile, a legit­i­mate com­ment gets tagged as spam, so I have to res­cue it. (Some­times I miss those and they get deleted. If I did that to one of yours I apologize.)

Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, com­ment spam is valu­able because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to fil­ter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just mak­ing sites solely for that pur­pose is a waste of time. But a link in a com­ment from a site Google con­sid­ers legit­i­mate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a lim­ited audi­ence) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the inter­net, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rank­ings and decreases the cost of pur­chas­ing ads.

That’s worth money, so scum­bags write pro­grams to scour the inter­net, find­ing sites where auto­mated com­ments can be entered. They are often writ­ten to look kind of like a generic nice com­ment, such as “Excel­lent points. Keep up the good work!” with hid­den links. If you write a real com­ment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.