Back on October 1st I wrote about DoFollow (the counter option to the default nofollow setting for blog comments) attracting a new breed of spam I called “fringe spam” (seemingly legitimate very general comment that points to an obvious spam URL). I’ve received more comments on that post than I normally do, and, surprisingly enough, I also received a few new comments on my first post about DoFollow back on April 16, 2007. Also, it comes as no surprise that some of those new comments were “fringe spam.” While those two observations aren’t irrefutable evidence in favor of my October 1st post assertions, they are enough of a smoking gun to conclude that DoFollow does attract “fringe spam.”

Fortunately, attracting “fringe spam” is not the end of the world, and certainly no reason NOT to join the DoFollow movement because there are three simple things you can do to reduce “fringe spam.”

Enable Akismet:

Obvious suggestion I know, however, just in case you’re running a blog without Akismet, you need to enable the Akismet plug-in which will catch a large percentage of all spam.

Use the WordPress Blacklist option:

On the WordPress dashboard select Options -> Discussion and then scroll down the page. Notice the section titled “Comment Blacklist.” This section describes its use in the following manner:

When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.

As you find “fringe spam” appear on your site extract something from that comment that the Blacklist can use. So far I’ve used email addresses and URLs and have been very happy with the results — they haven’t appeared again since I put them on the Blacklist. “Fringe spammers” will obviously find ways around Blacklisting but the more difficult it is to add a piece of “fringe spam” to a site, the more likely the “fringe spammers” will give up on your site and move on to their next victim.

Consider Comment Moderation:

From the WordPress dashboard select Options -> Discussion. Under the “Before a comment appears” section, place a check mark in the box next to the option “An administrator must always approve the comment.” Enabling this option will require all comments be approved by you before they appear on your site. I don’t approve comments before they are posted because I’m trying to do everything I can to encourage comments; however, if you find regular “fringe spammers” adding comments, you might consider holding all comments for approval. Of course, that option makes more work for you, but it will give you that much more control over comment spam. Also, take a few minutes and review all the comment options in this part of the WordPress dashboard. You might find ways to control “fringe spam” better suited to your site than I am recommending.

“Fringe spam” is real and based on my personal experience enabling DoFollow does attract more “fringe spam” than “nofollow.” I wouldn’t go so far to say that spam bots are roaming the net looking for DoFollow enabled sites, but real people are blog roaming and targeting their comments at these sites as an easy way to increase their external link counts. Blogger beware.

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Filed under: Blogging Related