How To Combat Splogs With Your Business Blog

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 4 of March , 2008 at 9:35 am

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, claims that 1/3 of all blogs are splogs:

(Source) Maybe you’ll be comforted in knowing that this statistic was derived based on the number of registered Wordpress blogs (2,523,000) and the number of splogs that Mullenweg has said the company has had to purge (more than 800,000), according to Web Pro News.

The originator of this story was WebProNews.

I think, frankly, the figure is low if Mullenweg is going by Akismet numbers. Counting Akismet purges and saying that represents the number of sploggers online is just too conservative because everyone knows that Akismet doesn’t catch all spam. Some spam, as every WordPress user knows, makes it past the Akismet filters and must be manually deleted. That means the figure is actually higher than the 31.7% as reported by WPN. Just how much higher? No one knows.

Search Engine Optimization Blog Spam has always been a big problem. E-mail spam resulted in legislation early in the Internet’s life, but spammers have largely ignored the law. It is likely that blog spammers don’t much care about netiquette either. It seems that splogs are big business. If they weren’t then sploggers wouldn’t be doing it.

The big question is what should real blog owners do to curb the spam. Or can we?

If you own a blog, I recommend the following when it comes to dealing with spam:

• Make sure you have an effective spam blocker like Akismet installed on your blog
• Set your blog comment approvals on administrator approved only
• When you approve a comment or trackback, visit the website of the commentator to see if it meets your approval - if it looks like spam, it probably is
• This measure may be a bit too strict for some as it will discourage real commentators from commenting on your blog, but you can enforce a policy of having all your commentators sign up and be logged in before being allowed to comment on your blog

Combatting spam is everyone’s responsibility. You have to decide how strict you want your comment policies to be on your blog. With a little bit of defensive splog strategy, you can kill the spam before it kills you and your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Category: Blogging

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