Comments on: Stop Scrapers and Spammers Fast

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:53:48 +0000

in the “link builders bible 2010″.

By: Arwen Taylor

Arwen Taylor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:57:57 +0000

I have my comments set so that I have to approve every first time commenter. After that, everyone who has been approved can comment freely.

I use Akismet. I used to use Bad Behavior but turned it off because I was having a problem with MSN not indexing my site (when it was MSN).

I haven’t seen my content turn up on other blogs yet except for the occasional blog who will post the title of my post and an excerpt with a link back to my blog. Still I try to interlink my posts and I use the WP Pluging copyright feed that puts a little notice at the bottom of my feed that states if the person is not reading the post in a feed reader then the blog they are reading is committing copyright theft. It’s not much but something is better than nothing.

By: r4 firmware

r4 firmware — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:08:14 +0000

Thanks for the additional information in case I ever have to go to the next step.

By: ZK @ Web Marketing Blog

ZK @ Web Marketing Blog — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:51:11 +0000

Before quitting I must say that you should start blogging as your hobby instead of earning money. Because if the aim of your blogging will be money than its for sure that you will get bore after three or four months when money will not come.

So in the initial period simply enjoy blogging and after establishing good readership you can try to earn money.

By: Daisy

Daisy — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:05:27 +0000

Crazy blogger: WordPress is Nofollow by default, but going nofollow does not mean no comment spam. Most of my blogs are nofollow, but still receive a disgusting amount of comment spam attempts, which I suspect are mostly automated. Akismet and manual approval is still the best way to go!

By: crazy blogger

crazy blogger — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:22:11 +0000

Aren’t spammer looking for do follow blogs only? If I make my blog no follow, will it reduce comment spam? And isn’t wordpress blog no follow by default?

By: Tech Tips

Tech Tips — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:07:18 +0000

Excellent info. I ran into a situation a couple months ago where someone scraped and entire post of mine and put it on their site, used exactly the same title and content, and then sent out a Tweet about it — using exactly the Same Title in the Tweet. Rather infuriating. Your post is very helpful for addressing this. Thanks.

By: Paul Hassing

Paul Hassing — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:31:55 +0000

Thank you, Seth. This was both frightening and instructive. I feel older and wiser for your words. Best regards, P. :)

By: Thomas Petty

Thomas Petty — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:19:35 +0000

Thanks for some great tips. I love Akismet, and really love the “Delete All Spam” button. Boom! All gone!

I didn’t know you could block it with the .htaccess file, so that’s a great tip. Haven’t had to use it (yet), but thanks for that tool to put in my toolbox!

By: Cominback

Cominback — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:09:55 +0000

Thansk for the Great article! It’s perfect for those of us that are still learning to be effective bloggers.
Fighting spam sucks and I’m thankful that WP offers the necessary plug ins.
I would have to agree partly with some of the comments above that scrapers can actually work in your favor.
To me, it is simply a way to spread your message and as long as you link your article correct, it builds external links for you.
Do I understand this correct or am I missing something?
Hmmm?

By: Umar

Umar — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:45:47 +0000

spammers are always annoying for me…but i have got rid from it by some wordpress plugins

By: fit flops

fit flops — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:56:00 +0000

I felt your effort of posting such useful links for us. Extremely well done and your choice of language makes them even more interesting. An occasional bit of irony or an elegant twist in the phrase is a welcome relief.

By: Ciprian

Ciprian — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:51:40 +0000

I use Mollom, a great module which can be installed on all major blogging platforms (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla). It has some very innovative features like:
- multilingual support for identifying spam;
- CAPTCHAs & text-analysis filters which really work;
- “crowdsourcing”. Basically all sites protected by Mollom can report comment spam that slipped through the cracks. Mollom combines and correlates this information and learns from it to help prevent future abuse.

Been using it with great success on http://www.7tutorials.com
Now I no longer need to use comments moderation. I only get 1-2 spam messages slipping/month which can be easily deleted.

By: William Whitlow

William Whitlow — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:11:49 +0000

This was an excellent article, and I love when I see people blogging about it.

It is so important to add content when blogging, time and time again, i’ve seen people put a “Great Article” with their link after it.

They added nothing!!

Nothing at all!!

My favorite ways to prevent this is to use good old fashioned “Moderate” each comment, and “Capcha”, both should keep the spammers out. I’m wondering what you’ll have as I push the “submit” button.

Anyways, powerful article on scrappers as well. I haven’t seen a lot of duplication, but I have seen tools that take blogs, articles, etc, and spin them into a completely different article, just saying it in a different word.

Not that I do this, but the tool operated by reading a few words at a time, and changing the order of the words around, and you chose. So you can spin like 10 or 20 articles from just 1.

Subject at hand is not to Scrape, period. It’s wrong. But your advice is great. Contact the person first, to get their side of the story.

See you on the net,

William Whitlow
http://www.williamwhitlow.com

By: Daisy

Daisy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:40:30 +0000

Capcha features make commenting impossible for blind readers. I use capcha on my blog, but I’d love an alternative. It’s just not accessible.

By: Tom Babinszki

Tom Babinszki — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:21:03 +0000

There is a fundamental problem with CAPTCHA, that it is in most cases not accessible for people with disabilities. There are certain solutions which might work, but in general a person who is blind cannot enter text from an image, but with their screen reader they are able to solve a challenge question. There is something that’s called an audio CAPTCHA which they can use, but it is still not helping deaf blind people. CAPTCHA in most of its forms is also creating a challenge for people with cognitive disabilities.

It is not to say don’t use verification, but use it wisely, put yourself into the shoes of people with different disabilities.

By: lair360

lair360 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:41:51 +0000

Tips: the fastest way to block these spammers is “htaccess”.
If you know how to use them…

By: Sarah Prout

Sarah Prout — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:34:37 +0000

My good friend Si Dawson just designed a great Twitter app for getting rid of spammers on Twitter. It’s called Twit Cleaner and gives you a very detailed report of people you need to block or unfollow etc. It’s such an awesome spam solution. http://www.twitcleaner.com :-)

I think there’s a growing trend of people that want to rid their blogs & social media sites of the spammers once and for all.

Cheers,
Sarah ;)

By: Carol White Llewellyn a.k.a. The Travel Maven

Carol White Llewellyn a.k.a. The Travel Maven — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:35:23 +0000

Thanks for sharing this information. I recently encountered a situation where a company scrapes content from various sites and uses it to put up a “directory” of a city. They charge others $1000 to advertise on this “directory.” In some posts, they put a link to the original site. In others, they don’t.

I asked for my content to be taken down, pointing out the illegality of using my copyrighted content without permission. They obliged.

It still infuriates me that they are profiting from plagiarized content. They even have the nerve to put their own privacy policy and copyright notice on their site.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:43:54 +0000

You can NEVER go wrong with unique content obviously. It’s something the net, and Google are dying to index, yet few have. On the other hand, I don’t mind re-publishing of articles if the original author gets their credit and they put the article somewhere decent on their site.