Spam Attacks! Oh dear…
My blog as of last two weeks have been attacked by spammers trying to promote their websites. I for one do not mind links and think they have their place within blog comments, as long as they contribute to the topic and are related.
I’ve got numerous cheeky comments along the lines of “Wow great site, keep up the good work” followed by a link to a website that has nothing what so ever to do with the topic or this blog at all.
The idea of these comments by spammers is to build inbound links to their websites. A good way of getting the spammer’s website PR up. However, it is a complete waste of time targetting WordPress blogs and other popular blogs and forums, as they now support the “rel=nofollow” attribute. WordPress will automatically add this attribute to the anchor tag of any link embedded within comments. You can verify this yourself. Look for a link within a comment, view the source of that page, and you will see the magical attribute telling search engines not to follow the link.
The nofollow tag was Google’s invention for controlling blog/forum spam links where spammers try to manipulate the search engines results. Google will completely ignore those links marked with the nofollow attribute and the PR of the website the link is on will not contribute towards the spammer’s website. So really, spammers are wasting their time.
The only benefit I can see posting a link within a comment is that if the link is related to the topic, this will entice viewers to click on the link bringing in free traffic.
 My blog is also setup so that all comments need to be approved by me, this is simply to combat spam comments littering my blog.
 Having said that, I completely encourage my readers to leave their two cents on the topics I write about.
Wordpress has a plugin called Akismet which detects comment spam and removes it for you. I hasn’t missed one yet.