Atlantis ‹ Comment Spam ›

February 06 2005 07:49 (+ 14 - 18 )

I'm catching them as quick as I can. I'm blocking the ip-ranges and deleting all comments from this-or-that loan and here-and-there blackjack. This is called referrer spam. They are left here by an internet bot, not a person. The idea behind it is not so much to get you to follow their links, but to increase their Google Page Rank by placing links to their businesses over and over and over again on as many different web pages as possible. The more links to their site, the higher their rank. The higher the rank, the more people who are actually looking for these things will be able to find it more quickly on Google.

Now, an upgrade in Pivot has what they call a fix for this. There is a tag that can be placed in the links which will stop Google's bot from following those links, therefore not increasing the rank. This is a no-win situation for me, becuase I still have to go through and delete all the spam. It's just more work for me. No thanks.

Anyway, now you know what's going on.

four comments:

Stingray [() (link)] February 08 2005 10:03

Guess I should also say that I check the referrers at my main page, too. That's another target location for spam.

While it is fun to run a website, it can be a lot of work, too.

wifey [ ] February 08 2005 11:07

But you do a good job of keeping them up and running, babe =)

eric [() (link)] February 19 2005 17:12

I feel your pain. Just took down my Pivotlog due to ridiculous amounts of comment spam. I believe that the new version (1.2.2) has some anti-spam functionality (see http://pivotlog.net), and there is a plugin that works like MTBlacklist, called (appropriately) Pivot Blacklist, that may help you out. Umm... info in Pivot Forums here:
http://forum.pivotlog.net/viewtopic.php?..

Stingray [() (link)] February 19 2005 18:05

Hey Eric,

Thanks for the tip. Perhaps one of these days I'll get around to upgrading this copy of Pivot then adding the blacklist. I seem to go into these spurts of laziness then activity when it comes to dealing with anything html and php, and I'm in my lazy spurt at the moment.