DygiScape

Social Media Frustrations: Trackbacks, Comment Spam and Splogs

Feb 5, 2008 Blogging, Geeky

Anyone who manages their own blog can relate to my frustration with spam in the blogosphere. This is the first topic I’d like to share my thoughts on as a part of my small series on Social Media Frustrations.

• Also check out: Social Media Frustrations: Spam, Spam and More Spam (on Social Networks)

Are trackbacks useful anymore?
Trackbacks served a great purpose for blog authors to be alerted (and let their visitors) know when another person links to your blog entry in their blog entry. However, for the past year, I’ve seen excessively high volume of trackback spam compared to a year ago. I’m debating whether or not I should continue to allow trackbacks; however, this begs the question, are trackbacks even useful anymore?

Comment Spam is more annoying than effective.
While a blog is a great communication tool, there’s folks that we don’t want to talk to — spammers. Spammers aim to promote their products either to your visitors, or to Google in an effort to raise their PageRank. I’m perplexed by the volume of comment spam because it just isn’t effective because of anti-spam services like Akismet, Defensio or Spam Karma. It’s more frustrating because as a blog owner, I have to go through, tag comments that slipped through as spam and force legitimate comments through.

My question is, does comment spam fall under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? If legislation could be enacted to cover this category of abuse, then perhaps we could seek resolution and reduction of Spam. On the contrary, we can judge the effectiveness of the current legislation based on all the junk mail we still receive.

Spam + Blogs = Splogs = Junk!
As more chatter happens in the blogosphere, less than noble “marketers” focus their efforts to infiltrate it and compete for your attention. Their blogs lack useful (or interesting) content, except for excerpts of otherwise legitimate blog posts. The goal of these blogs are intended to mislead readers and force inexperienced readers into clicking on their contextual text advertising. In all honestly, Splogs are effective, but they are only as good as their advertising, so if you report them to the advertising network, they risk forfeiture of all earnings. While I don’t have the time to report these, it would be nice if services like Technorati would provide an abuse reporting services.

The solution to all this is to provide stronger tools for publishers to protect their content from spam, allow easier reporting to providers. SpamCop accomplished this for e-mail, but it would be even better of a service could expand carry the same benefits for bloggers.

Fed up with blog spam? Share your tips and tricks or even gripes in the comments below.

Tags: Blogging, discussion, social media, spam