Why SEO-Conscious Blog Owners Need WP-SpamFree

by Scott Allen

Spam Steals Time and Money

Most of us are familiar with blog comment spam. For some who don’t have adequate protection, it can cost many hours of valuable time trying to clean up spam, or trying to wade through a spam queue. Those of you who are business owners are keenly aware that time is money, and this deluge of spam can have negative financial effects on your business.

Spam is an SEO Problem

Another problem with spam is its effect on your blog’s search engine optimization efforts. Search engines measure the quality of your outbound links, and if you aren’t moderating your comments, there could be comment links on your site to bad neighborhoods, which are spammy sites that search engines have identified. Sites that link to these will often be penalized.

Blog spam has been a problem for as long as blogs have existed. It exists for two reasons: 1) To game search engines and get artificial rankings for sites, and 2) To get as many people to click on links to spammy, fly-by-night product sites or made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites. Ultimately spammers want traffic because that’s how they make money. To spam blogs, they either use automated programs known as “bots”, or they do it manually. Whether manual or automated, they do this by either using targeted anchor text in the “Comment Author” field on the comment form and typing a rather legitimate looking comment, or by trying to insert a lot of links with targeted anchor text into the “Comment” field.

It’s extremely common for unethical SEO’s or those less experience in search engine optimization to comment on blogs using a moniker for the “Comment Author” field that has desirable anchor text (a term they are trying to rank for), since it will show up in the comment link. Comment authors with “names” that have local cities + “SEO”, like “Pheonix SEO” for example, are not uncommon. (Not targeting any SEO’s in Phoenix, that was just a random city for the example.) The same thing happens with web development firms that try to use less than ethical (or skillful) approaches, so you’ll also see comment authors with names like “Phoenix Web Development”. That gives the rest of us a bad name. I think these are obvious and blatantly self-promotional, as do many blog authors who instantly delete comments like this, but not everyone does, so many sneak through.

Even Though NoFollow Helps, It Won’t Protect You Fully

Some of you might ask, “What is this NoFollow I hear of, and won’t it protect me?” Search engines came up with an attribute you can add to links that will allow you to tell the search engine that you don’t want that link to pass any link juice to the linked site. To do so, you just add rel="nofollow" to your links, like this: <a href="http://www.site-you-want-link-to.com" rel="nofollow">Link Anchor Text</a>. Most blogging software uses the nofollow attribute on all comment links by default. In WordPress there are several plugins that allow you to remove it.

Even if you use nofollow, you aren’t completely protected. There is a lot of debate on this topic and it’s not clear if all search engines implement it fully. Google seems to, but then I wouldn’t risk having outbound links to bad neighborhoods even if they were “protected” by nofollow. Would you?

Blogs with DoFollow and/or Unmoderated Comments Are the Biggest Targets

Blog spam is especially a problem for those who use DoFollow plugins (plugins that remove the rel=”nofollow” from outbound links in the comment area). Luckily most blogs use the nofollow attribute in comment links, but for those who don’t, you have a big red target on your blog for spammers. People put together huge directories and lists of DoFollow sites. Big…Red…Target.

Blogs that don’t moderate comments are also targets. Because you are responsible for the content published on your site and blog, I advise everyone to use comment moderation, as much of a nuisance as it might seem. (If you don’t moderate comments, you better have a damn good anti-spam plugin.) Comment spammers love unmoderated blogs because they can pretty much have their way with them and unload their spammy links on unsuspecting blog owners.

WP-SpamFree Declares War on Unethical SEO’s and Heavy Spammers

Some firms and individuals within the SEO and web development industries give a black eye to the rest of us with some of their tactics. It takes an ethical SEO professional to know how to fight unethical SEO’s and internet marketers. As of Version 1.9, WP-SpamFree includes a number of features that fight these unethical marketers who try to spam blogs for links. Some of the new features make it impossible to use desirable (keyword) anchor text related to SEO and web development in the “Comment Author” field when leaving comments. Sorry spammers, you’ll have to get legitimate links from now on. :)

We will be calling on the community for help in constantly improving this area of spam defense. If you have the plugin installed and ever do have a spammer post a comment with a comment author that seems to be targeted keyword anchor text, let us know, and an update will be released shortly with an upgraded algorithm to block it in the future.

WP-SpamFree will continue to target the biggest sources of blog spam, not just SEO and web development. I won’t get into specifics, but know that many other industries engaged in heavy spamming are having an incredibly difficult time trying to spam blogs protected by this plugin.

If enough of us fight back, we can put spammers out of business because it will no longer be financially viable to try and spam blogs. These aren’t just empty words - many blog owners who use this plugin report that they now have 0 spam and have to continued to have no spam for months.

Improving the Quality of Blog Conversations

You might not realize it, but WP-SpamFree does fight human spam as well as automated spam from bots. The great thing with this plugin is that it doesn’t inconvenience users, and when people submit comments, nothing goes into a black hole like with other popular anti-spam plugins. The user is immediately notified if their comment is rejected, and if their comment was identified as spam, they have a second chance to leave a legitimate comment that adds something to the conversation. And, it’s all about the conversation, right?

Protect Your Blog and End Blog Spam

Protect your blog and help put spammers out of business.

Download WP-SpamFree today.