A Spam Bleg
Posted by Jacques Chester on Sunday, July 6, 2008
I spent an hour or two today poking around Club Troppo for old spam using Google11. Why?: Necessary because Google, Technorati and others punish sites who have spammy links in any abundance. Technorati for one has refused to visit this site for most of a year. [↩]. The trick is to drop spammy keywords and use Google’s site: capability to focus on a particular address.
There was less than I thought — a few comments from way back in the archive which I’ve removed. More insidiously there were a few ‘noscript’ spams: spam which is visible to the search engine but not to regular web browsers. Very very annoying. A quick look around reveals that this was due to a known (but not much talked about by the Wordpress folk) defect in Wordpress 2.3.3.
In any case, one thing that struck me in all this is that spam tools like Spam Karma and Akismet don’t allow me to do a retroactive sweep. I have to look for spam by hand. What I’d like to be able to do is run our existing stock of comments through these tools to check what else might have eluded me. Club Troppo has more than 50,000 comments and I don’t feel like going through them by hand.
A few Google searches don’t turn up anything of this sort, so I’d be interested to hear if anyone knows of such a tool.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 10:55 AM and filed under Blegs, Blogging - general, Site News.
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I have the same problem (Google ranking was good earlier in the year, now nonexistent, & finding rubbish code in old posts. I’d be very interested to hear of retrospective sweeping tools, too.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 7:47 am | PermalinkFor the moment I’m using Google Alerts to sweep the site for instances of keywords like ‘poker’, ‘cialis’ etc. The Google index also sees through the noscript spam so anything that’s affected turns up.
I hope our Google standing will creep up a little overall. Luckily we’re firmly established as the top result for ‘club troppo’ over some nightclub in NSW.
I reckon we might also get penalised for having a surfeit of outgoing links — a lot of spam blogs have that pattern.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 9:18 am | PermalinkHey that’s a good thing that Google do, it helps devalue spam.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 9:56 am | PermalinkSeems very unwieldy. Woe betide the Nigerian socialist bloggers who want to discuss card-playing or sexual health.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 12:03 pm | PermalinkNot really. Google Alerts is smart enough only to send you things it hasn’t already sent you. So if it happens again I’ll get an email.
Posted on 08-Jul-08 at 12:22 pm | Permalink