Online Marketing Blog

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Dear “SEO Consulting Services New York” and you too “Starting A Home Business”,

I have an admission to make: I don’t like comment spam. You are comment spammers. Our readers don’t like you. I don’t like you. You’re not welcome here.

Our Akismet filter has been doing a good job of filtering out spam and our commenting filters within Disqus catch most of the non-automated spammy comments. But they still persist. Most people active online have real names (obvious I know, but stay with me). If they don’t use their real name, it’s popular to use a “handle”.   I can see that it might be reasonable for some people to have a few different handles, but for the most part, singular identities are the norm.

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 – The iFrame – The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

Spam is one of those features that comes with a blog and stopping it isn’t quite as easy as it should be. Here are a few ideas to help you out.

1. Install Akismet – This has to be one of the best plugins. The downside is they’d like you pay if you get a ton of spam. After all, it is the nice thing to do. For the average user though, it’s free.
2. Install Spam Karma – Excellent plugin that can stop a flood of spam comments. It works great and it’s completely free.
3. Install a captcha. It can be as easy as 2+2=? or it could be one of those letter puzzles. Personally I prefer the math ones as long as it’s not something like “What’s 28×5″. Keep it simple as I think 2+8 works just as good.

The sheer irony of this post nearly kills me as I’ve had it in my queue to post for a few weeks now. In a presentation I gave at SES Chicago, a video interview with WebProNews and in previous blog posts, I have articulated both a naive confidence in the social news communities at being able to capably police spam as well as reasons not to spam social media in the first place.

And yet the effort was made within the digg community to disallow any stories from Online Marketing Blog from being submitted to digg with no chance of a human evaluation of the situation or process of reinclusion. digg has taken a DMOZ style persona in handling such matters with the puzzling part being domain names can be banned as a result of actions that have nothing to do with the owner of the web site. At least Google and Yahoo are mature enough to have a review and reinclusion processes in place

I was recently reading a post on Marc Pentermann’s blog that suggests social media optimization is pretty much SPAM for social media. My comments about that are as follows:

I think the issue of SPAM and any kind of marketing will always exist regardless of the medium. Email, web pages, blogs and social media are all susceptible.

Just because it is possible to SPAM a medium does not invalidate that medium. Should we not send email because others use it for SPAM? That would not make sense.

It is also important to note that SPAM-focused efforts are not long term marketing solutions. Leveraging the opportunities with social media makes it easier for marketers to reach their intended audience and for users to find and share the content they’re interested in.

I received a comment yesterday on how Feedblitz emails had stopped arriving for one user.  I’m not sure what blog he’s subscribed (the issue wasn’t with this one) but there could be a handful of reasons why the email notifications are not arriving.  However, today I noticed that my Feedblitz alerts, that I had previously setup for a few blogs, were now showing up in my Gmail spam box.  I’m not sure what triggered the email to be marked as spam, however Gmail didn’t like it.

If you are subscribed to a blog via Feedblitz, and the emails stop coming, check your spam box and make sure they aren’t just getting filtered out.

[tags]feedblitz, spam, gmail[/tags]

Blogs sure are great, and owners are doing everything they can to optimize them for search engines, but what about people? There are a few usability plugins that make it easier for visitors to interact with your site.

Optimal Title / SEO Title : Good title tags are not just for search engines. They also appear in the users history and possibly bookmarks. Title tags should be specific -> generic. So, don’t start all your tittle tags with your blog name please.

Subscribe to Comments : Getting comments is one trick, keeping the people up to date on the comment discussion is important. I can’t think of how many times I’ve posted and then I couldn’t remember where I made my comments. Email notifications is a great way to get updates on comments and keep your visitors connected.