I try pretty hard not to be spammy in any way possible and I see lots of sites that are very spammy that get great results in Google and Yahoo! That gets a little irritating at times but it’s the nature of the beast. What’s driving me nuts is Akismet Anti-spam WordPress Plugin.
The reason why we all have blogs is to post and get comments. . . and the commenters should leave links that are relevant and not spam. Akismet, for whatever reason, has decided that I’m a spammer. Even to my own blogs.
I tested this blog URL with some posts to my other blogs to see what was going on with Akismet and sure enough my comments went straight to spam. I emailed WordPress.com and they said that my posts on other blogs are appearing. Yes, I told them, on blogs that I’ve been approved on but on blogs that I’ve never posted on for whatever reason I’m sent to Akismet hell. They directed me to Akismet. They didn’t really get it at first. They seemed to think everything was just fine since some of my posts were appearing but when I explained to them that I did a test on one of my own blogs that I’ve never posted on with this url and it went to spam then they said, talk to Akismet.
Well, I checked out the WordPress forum and found others having this same problem. One thing suggested is for WordPress.com users to send an email to support for the person being seen as spam. That may help. The general consensus about getting help from Akismet is, you most likely won’t get any help. One thing many commented on in the forum is, Akismet has a tendency to label you as a spammer if you add any hyperlinks. Nice! No. . . don’t give me any useful links that might make my post better, that’s spam! Of course my blog in nofollow but a link is still a link and that is very spammy.
Personally I liked Akismet but when I think about it I start to wonder if it is really doing anything at all. OK, it separates out what it thinks is spam into a different menu. OK, and that helps me how? Now I have two menu items to look through because I can’t trust Akismet not to have lots of false positives. It seems that Akismet sees you as a spammer till proven wrong; however, once you end up going into the spam hell of Akismet is it really possible to ever get out? I doubt most really look at their Akismet spam to see how many false positives they have in there.
You would think that this spam detection software would be slightly “intelligent.” Shouldn’t it be able to spot a one liner from a 250 word comment and realize. . . despite what I’ve thought about this “spammer” in the past maybe this is a real comment. Just because they left a link in a comment once before doesn’t necessarily mean they are a spammer.
The more I blog the more annoyed I become at the internet. There are tons of “box” sites that actually get ranked. Tons of cross linking sites that are just google adsense and spam. Tons of spammers spamming every blog and scraping every post. And why is it all coming about? Because of all the stupid things google and yahoo have done over the years with adds, filters, etc. They’ve mad this mess and what I find funny about it is, they say they want it to stop but they have their adds on all these scraped and spammy sites?!?!?!?!
It’s just hilarious. Google wants everyone to nofollow anything and everything that might be questionable but Google adsense is on every single spammy ass site there is! Go figure?!?!?!
They’ve been caught using Akismet to blackball folks as well who disagree with them.
Thanks Dr. Mike for the link.
I tried to remove akismet but you need it for stats and other plugins work with it. . . so it is still on my blogs; however, it is a fairly useless plugin.
I understand the spam problem! There are tons of people spamming and scraping but these plugins really don’t help at all. I used wp-ban for a while and it banned me! And NO, I didn’t put my IP in it. Just one day I tried to access some blogs I manage and I couldn’t.
The real problem is the fact that the search engines allow spammy sites to get ranked. What we all need to do is report every site that scrapes to the search engine spam report–a couple million people doing this daily might get the message through. The search engines are creating this mess and doing very little to resolve it.
The only way spam will stop is,
1. The search engines ban spam. It would be easy for them to do. A) Remove all sites that are redirects and ban the original site, B) reduce link value so it’s not an arms race–use on page for ranking and links only as a single vote, despite the PR of the site it’s coming from. 1=1 but make that secondary to on page. C) Reduce the value of the title tag! Put the value on headers an paragraphs. D) Devalue all meta data. - SEO experts keep saying that keywords don’t get you ranked. I don’t know what they’ve been looking at but I can show you tons of sites that rank only because of their keywords, especially on yahoo. E) Nofollow really means NOFOLLOW! The search engines follow nofollow. STOP! What’s the point of having it. Spammers know this and they know there is a value to be had if enough comments are made. Get a clue google! F) Devalue or eliminate totaly any value on the domain name–Yahoo! Get a clues, this is how people spam you, Yahoo! Setup a redirect of their website with the domain name that has the keywords they want to rank for. How stupid can you be!
That would help a lot, and yahoo pulling its collective head out of you know where might help also. The Search Engines have stupid spam filters and don’t go after the obvious assaulters.
2. We, as end users, NEVER ever buy or click on links on anything that is spam. And report the spam to the sites they are linking to. What usually happens is some business hires someone for marketing and that marketer then goes about spamming everyone. Tell the site owners and they will usually do something.
3. As bloggers we need to control our blogs. And free blog servers need to take down spam sites asap–bogger! No and if or buts about it. If you scrap or spam then you are gone! Spam sites are obvious!
There just isn’t a reason for an alternative health site to be getting dozens of car insurance comments on every post! Gee google, yahoo, live. . . can’t you tell that this site leaving all these links is spam?!? Wouldn’t a good filter go like, if link from page has keywords that match in bound page but have nothing to do with the out bound page = spam. No value given. If same link and keywords continue over X# of times in given period then all links to page = 0. Oh, I know everyone says, then spammers will spam your site that way. Well, that’s a lot of work to throw at your competition and secondly, if rank is due to on page factors over links then the page should always maintain good rank if not spammy.
We need to make our sites good ones. Add Dofollow for valid comments and plugins like commentluv and keywordluv so commentors get valid links for their effort and anyone else is deleted. Remove all these stupid spammy plugins like recent commentors, top commentors and any other plugin that gives site wide links. These are bad for everyone! Very bad!
We ALL need to get a clue and stop the arms race for links. That’s not what the web is about. The search engines are the only ones that can ultimately stop this and we are the only ones that can bug them enough to do it!
All these plugins are just bad band aids!
OK. . . that’s my rant for the day
Can you tell this all bugs me just a little?