I’m sick and tired of a new kind of blog spam that is appearing on the Internet in general and on my site in particular. So called auto-blogs, that is blogs that are running an automated script adding content to their website without user interaction, are pinging the blogs that they rip off like crazy for a reason.
Most of those auto-blogs copy the first paragraph of a story and send a ping to the blog that they copied the paragraph from. This si done automatically because a link to the blog in question is placed on the auto-blog as well. Those pingbacks appear in the comments of many blogs in the last weeks and I thought it is time to stop this once and for all.
They usually begin with ‘xxx wrote an interesting post today’ where xxx is a random first name. As soon as I see this I know it is spam. I used to verify this in the beginning by visiting the site of the pingback only to see that it had thousands of similar posts from a lot of websites.
Another indicator is that those sites usually have thousands or more posts already. Many of those auto-blogs show their post count in the title of the story. If it is starting with ?p=xxxxx you can be fairly sure that it is a auto-blog if p is larger than a few thousand entries.
Stopping that spam is actually rather uncomplicated. I do use Spam Karma which has a nice blacklist feature. I can add a domain name to be blacklisted from my website with no problem.
All I need to do is select Domain Blacklist and enter the domain name without http://www.
The effect is of course that a Pingback from such a domain is getting a bad score in Spam Karma which means that this entry is going right into the spam folder.
Related posts:
How To Handle Bulk Spam As A WebmasterComment Spam without URLs
Wordpress: Your attempt to edit this post has failed
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Dear Spammers..
Wordpress Issues
Interesting .com Domain Name Facts
DoFollow for regular commenters
you could always use those nifty ‘captcha’ codes. most bots can figure them out.
can’t*
lol
I also tend to monitor every comment posted… Only 100% safe way really…
Captchas do not work when another site sends a pingback. That’s automatic.
Why not just have it send all posts that include “an interesting post today” to the moderation filter. I don’t think many people will be saying that in their comments. That’s what I do, and it’s extremely effective.
If a particular site bugs me too much, I just access one of the bot farm command newsgroups and have the bots ping the arsehole to death. I love these bot hackers. They leave their bots open for all to use :)
I have such a small time blog, and yet I get them as well…