This is the third site of mine that I put up a blog. The first one I put up was to express thanks to the men and women in our military. You can see it HERE. I actually put it up over a year ago and subsequently forgot about it.

I went and checked on it last week so I could revive it for the coming holidays and much to my surprise, I saw hundreds of Comments posted. I was excited because I figured people were commenting to our military.

Wrong!

It was spam. Blog spam to be exact.

Blog spam is used to try to help the spammers get better page ranking by having incoming links from other sites. They typically use automated software to do this. The result is a heaping pain in the ass for the blog owner, cleaning the garbage. There were links to gambling sites, poker, free sex, pharmaceuticals - and so much more.

Well, not one to be done in by spammers, I did a little research and found a way to combat the automated posters. If you try to comment, you will notice that there is a box to put in a code which changes with each poster (actually, it changes when you refresh your screen). That’s to ensure the post is being placed by a real person and not a script.

Can the spammer still get through? Well, it’s too soon to tell but anything is possible. For now though, they have to post by hand on THIS blog. Which slows them down considerably.

It’s like anything else - spammers find a way to spam - anti-spammers find a way to slow it down or stop it - spammers find another way - and on and on . . .

So if you have a blog, and you do not have this layer of anti-spam, you will eventually get spammed. I would recommend having that spam protection put in.

Happy Blogging!

Michael