Friday, January 05, 2007

Stopping blogspam

My corporate blog is getting hammered by blogspam. Fortunately for the readers I have moderation turned on. But this means that I end up reading all the linkspam.

98% of the blogspam I get is not trying to contact my readers, it is trying to manipulate the Google PageRank algorithm. At this point I don't know whether it is an attempt to boost or suppress rankings. One could easily imagine that if Google started to penalize for suspected blogspamming that people would start to look at ways they might use this to attack competitors and we have seen many examples of this in spam blacklists.

The key observation is that the spammers are attacking the search engine through my blog. I want the search engine to index my blog but not the comments.

So solution #1 (a variation of a scheme I think was due to Dan Boneh)

<body>
<h1>The blogspam problem</h1>
<p>I get lots of blogspam</p>
<p>3 Comments</p>
<x:external>
<p>Alice says: Yeah me too</p>
<p>Bob says: And me!</p>
<p>Carol says: Nice post, have you considered how <a href="http://titaniumbearings.ru/">would solve your problem?
</x:external>

More on this tommorow

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