Daily Dose Of Spam

They say that the number of spam in your blog is a good measure of how visible your website is on the Internet.  I’m not really one to believe that but if you think about it again, there seems to be some truth behind it.

At one point in your blog’s life it was still new, you just posted your first blog and the whole website was not yet properly optimized for the search engines.  Time goes by and you are able to build backlinks for your blog, participate in forum discussions, submitted your ideas to article directories, spread the word via Twitter, and made a fan page on Facebook.

The visitor counter started to turn, comments came in and so did spam.  By the dozens.

You join the DoFollow movement and links on your blog post’s comments are now NoFollow free.  Bam!  More comments come in and an the influx of unwanted spam hits the roof.

All too familiar isn’t it?

Well it should be since most of us bloggers have experienced this in one way or another, and are, every day, still spending several minutes wading through the comments marked by good old Akismet as spam.  I know I do.

Every now and then a good comment is incorrectly marked as spam.  It is the blogger’s duty and responsibility to rescue it.  That is why I always make it a point not to just trash the spam comments no matter how tempting and easy it is to click on the “Delete All Spam” button.

It used to be that checking the spam comments  can be done weekly.  Now, letting a week pass by before I check it and I’m flooded with spam in the hundreds. A very time-consuming ordeal.

A daily routine of checking the spam comments is more appropriate.  If I can’t have that time to check for spam every day, I make it every other day.

Perhaps it’s time to replace Akismet for one of those Wordpress comment plugin such as IntenseDebate or Disqus.  Do these effectively stop spam? I really don’t know.  I like to keep things simple.  Requiring visitors to login or make an account for one simple comment seems to be too much for me.