Spam, one of the darker sides of the Internet, is a multi-billion dollar business, built on the backs of countless honest website owners that sometimes don’t even realize that their work is exploited. There are many types of spam in the wild and spammers seem to keep up with the newest technologies by creating new and ingenious ways to abuse the system.
One of the most prevalent forms of spam is web spam, a practice that aims to artificially increase the PageRank of a site, by creating numerous backlinks to the respective page. There are many ways of creating web spam, but perhaps the most common is comment spam. Comment spammers take advantage of the comment section of publicly accessible websites to create links to their own web properties. Most comment spamming is automated as specialized bots roam the Internet to find targets and automatically post prefabricated comments.
The effects of comment spamming go from simple nuisances to a complete disruption of the functioning of a website. Spam messages pollute discussion boards, waste server resources, and take time and effort to remove. Read on to see what you can do to prevent annoying spam from flooding your comment sections.