Block 'wrote an interesting post today' spam

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 is 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 decided 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.

Update: You can blacklist domains directly in WordPress as well if you prefer that. To do so open Settings > Discussion and add any domain name you want to block to the comment blacklist setting there.

Advertisement