List of blogs that do not verify comments are traded on Internet marketing forums, services and websites. Webmasters fight a constant battle against spam. When I started Ghacks six years ago it was a small site, and I was able to verify all comments, trackbacks and pingbacks manually.

But a lot has changed since then. More and more tools that automate the commenting have been created, to the point that everyone can use them without problems. All that is needed is a big list of blogs that accept comments and that’s it.

Advanced spammers use proxy lists, virtual private networks, unique comments with variables (for instance the authors name included) and more to improve the chances that the comments are accepted on the spammed sites.

Ghacks today receives more than 900 spam comments per day. That still may not sound as much considering that other blogs may very well receive tens of thousands of comments per day. I moved from manually checking every comment to only checking comments sporadically, mainly because of time constraints.

Ghacks has received its 1 Millionth spam comment in this month, another blog milestone. Akismet did not record spam from the very beginning which means that the actual figure may indeed be a lot higher than the one reported. The one million mark has been reached in the last three years.

I have tried a lot to reduce the amount of spam but have not found one reliable option to block spam before it reaches the blog. Tried a lot but nothing worked, or interfered with regular commenters who started reporting troubles.

Next to the one million spam comments are more than 79k legit comments, a ratio of 1:12.6 which I think is incredible.

Are you a webmaster? How do you cope with spam?

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.