Okay, I admit I am new blogger.
Today I made a HUGE ‘newbie blogger’ mistake that I’m sure many bloggers and website owners haven fallen prey to.
My hope is by sharing what I have learned it will help others to avoid the same mistakes.
First, you should know my entire purpose in creating this blog was to provide helpful, free content for individuals and businesses relating to small business issues by using my CPA knowledge and my Sales and Marketing background as the basis for my content. The intent is to provide this information FREE, without pushing my CPA services at all. I strongly believe this is the only way to actually be heard in this day and age, especially with so much media and push advertising constantly being shoved in front of our eyes and ears. So far, I have enjoyed this immensely – BUT…
I am learning some costly mistakes along the way, including the topic of this post, which is about BLOG and WEB SPAMMERS.
Having had my WordPress blog site up for about a month, I noticed today that I had over 300 comments sitting in the SPAM folder on my blog site (and over 700 since I started blogging). When I opened the folder and read these comments, they all seemed VERY complimentary to each of my articles and I didn’t understand why there were in my Spam folder at all! So like so many new, beginning, naive bloggers… I deleted the obvious SPAM comments, and simply approved the others, thereby allowing them to be posted. Ooops… big mistake!
What I have now discovered is that by approving those comments, I have fallen prey to spamming robots (called ‘spam bots’) and even hired human blog-web spammers. To make matters worse, this can affect my Google and search ratings! This is certainly not a good way to start out blogging, but now that I know this I want to SHARE this information to anyone that follows my blog and to all new bloggers out there.
As long as we learn and help others with our own mistakes, I believe it will be returned to us (in some form) in the future.
My blog is a simple, totally free blog site with WordPress. Even with the free version, anyone can utilize many of their free plug-in widgets and applications. One of these plug-in applications that helps to block these blog and web spammers is something called Akismet (I had never heard of it before today). I am sure there are other applications provided by other blog and web sites, but this particular application is utilized by WordPress (just FYI). Anyway, I discovered this tool today as I was reviewing all of these ‘wonderful’ comments that were placed in my Spam folder – and then realized that this ‘Akismet’ application had been the culprit that placed them there. At first I was irritated (they were good comments after all, I thought). I became curious and wondered WHY it did this and HOW it determined what was spam and what was a legitimate comment. So I dug a little deeper and realized this application was actually protecting me exactly the way it was intended to do. It was actually my own action of un-spamming and approving those comments that allowed myself to be bamboozled by these Spammers!
These spam bots and personal spammers are quite tricky! They post flattering and complimentary comments on your blog and web site for the sole purpose of having you approve their comments so they are posted on your site. Once you do this, THEY SELL YOUR CONTENT and often entice your readers to follow them to their site to sell them their own products. Often they even sell link-backs to YOUR OWN BLOG for small amounts of money to their customers! They do this without your permission of course, and certainly without sharing their revenues.
Again, shame on me for not researching this BEFORE approving those comments. The price paid will be mine, as it will now take me the same amount of time to go back and delete all of those comments as it did when I originally approved them. Fortunately only my time is lost….. for this mistake.
This certainly shows the vulnerability we are constantly exposed to in our technologically dependent society – and often without ever realizing it.
Below is the link of a short article that is a MUST READ regarding 5 things every blogger should know and spam bots and web spammers.
This particular article is from ‘Akismet’ but I am only suggesting it for the content it provides. My intent for this post is not to suggest or recommend Akismet or WordPress. This information will apply to any web or blog site and probably any type of web-spam blocking tool that is available through your own web or blog provider. I hope you find it as useful and helpful as I did. Enjoy!
FIVE THINGS EVERY BLOGGER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SPAM: How we stop comment and trackback spam.
CPA Ramblings from the cloud... helping businesses grow 
Thanks Michele, I’ve also noticed on some of these spam comments their English is um… no the best shall we say. As a fellow newbie, Thanks!!
It’s true (about their English). I think they may be using an automatic word/article spinner application. I just found about those today too. Sneaky little things, aren’t they? Ah well… live and learn! Thanks for the comment, Neo-Vie
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