Fighting Comment Spam

Over the past few months I have received on this site, and on another blog of mine Mad About Madrid, a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. Comment spam is a technique used by certain webmasters and owners of websites to develop links from blogs (often with a high PR) to their own site. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Adding links that point to the spammer's web site increases the page rankings for the site in the search engine Google. An increased page rank means the spammer's commercial site would be listed ahead of other sites for certain Google searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Comment spam falls into diffferent categories with the most basic being a blatant link left on an article to the spammer's  website. Some of the more subtle ones leave a comment on the blog which you think is innocuous enough but on closer inspection is still spam.

My own opinion is to stamp it out wherever possible and I always delete comment spam wherever I see it. Why should others benefit from the hard work and time that I put into building my site? However, I´m always happy to accept comments from people who I believe add value to an article or who raise reasonable objections to what I write.

If you're using TypePad, make sure that you receive email notification of new comments and trackbacks. Delete spam comments and trackbacks before Google or other search engines spider your site. You should also make a note of the IP address of the spammer and add it to your IP banning list.

It wouldn't do any harm to look at what they're doing at  Chongqed. You can leave details of the spammer on the site, find out which sites spam and help to stam out spam. Adam Kalsey has a good article about the subject with 184 comments (hopefully not all spam!).

Related Articles
Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam (Six Apart)
Comment Spam Manifesto (Adam Kalsey)
Comment Spam Compiled and Interpreted (sitepoint)
How spammers are targeting blogs (BBC)
Combating Comment Spam (WordPress)
Solving Comment Spam (Simon Willison's Weblog)