Be Carefull of Blogs

[Andy]

I recently came across a big proglem with blogs.

My main site urgentclick.com had a blog to mention updates to the site and after a couple of months my web hosts emailed me to say they disabled this part of the site since it was too popular and affecting other sites on the same server. I found this very odd since this blog was not so interesting!

Lately I checked another similar blog that I set up and was amazed to see around quarter of a million hits and 2 gigs of data transfer in 2 weeks this month. When I looked at the raw logs, I saw huge numbers of hits from prescription ddrrugs sites etc. so they were all hoping to get their url published on the web at my expense. So before my site was shut down, I quickly ftp'ed to it and changed the name of the blog directory and updated the link from the home page. So these referral spam sites will now point to an error 404 page which I hope will consume much less bandwidth and damage their search engine positions.

So, my tip for bloggers is to regularly change the directory name for your blog, disable comments for visitors and don't display any stats pages to the public. I think the blog spammers track the pings to target the active blogs.

[webmastme]

I've heard of this from others.  Seems to be more of a problem than most people think.

[Hope]

Andy, is this just log spamming or is it really blog spamming?

[Andy]

It's both. I started out by removing the stats page and disabled comments by guests. That took care of the comment spam and the outbound links from the stats page. I assume this is what you mean by blog spamming?

But the hits continued and started to balloon the log file which I believe is invisible to search engines and the public. It just wastes my bandwidth as the pages they hit on are served up. I am hoping that error404 is a very small bandwidth hit.

[Hope]

I really hate the log spamming. That is just pointless to me. It is dirty and underhanded. It is worse the blog spamming.

We get a lot of the log spamming on our sites. This has caused a great deal of frustration since it has increased log files by as much as 400% on some sites

[Andy]

And then there is email spamming You don't even need to publish an email, they just send to anything they can think of at your domain. At least modern hosting packages have easy to use filtering options.

A big part of the problem must be programmers who write software to automate this spamming process and then some marketers sell this software on as viral marketing tools to newbie webmasters who are desperate to make a fast buck online and avoid going to work.

[susieq]

Yes Andy, there is nothing worse

A big part of the problem must be programmers who write software to automate this spamming process and then some marketers sell this software on as viral marketing tools to newbie webmasters who are desperate to make a fast buck online and avoid going to work.

I think it could be a case also of the these 'programmers' changing sides and falling onto whichever offers the best deal

[Hope]

The real problem is lazy people who want to get rich quick. One of these days people are going to realize that there is no way to getting rich quick, except by inhereting it. That isn't even quick.

[Brandon]

Thanks for this information. i am planning on putting a blog on my site.

[Andy]

Blogs are aimed at people who want to post an on-line diary or rant about their favorite subject. But, because blogs are a source of fresh content for search engines, the get rich quick brigade cottoned on to it as a way to market their stuff. I don't personally see a problem since I too would like to get rich quick  But it's up to the search engines to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

I have just been reading Ken Evoy's ideas and they are very interesting. He is talking about using RSS (Real Simple Syndication) which I posted on before with near zero interest. He seems to think that RSS feeds will take over from email opt-in lists and after reading the material I think it may well be true as long as people adopt RSS readers as part of their normal web browing habits.

Learn about RSS