Comment and Testimonial Page Spamming

Our client's point person called up 6pm today in a disquieted voice. She told me that their site was spammed. With our developer already out of the office, I immediately checked their website and found detestable entries in their testimonial page and here's the snapshot.



I quickly accessed the database and deleted those absurd entries which brings back the clean page and I had a sigh of relief. Here's how their cleaned up page looks like.




So, what do they do this for? The answer is Link Building! Link building is a by-product of Page Rank mania. Page Rank in layman's terms is Google's way of determining the relevancy and credibility of a page by counting the number of inbound links pointing to that page, of course together with a lot of other factors. This has lead to some BLACK HAT SEO techniques related to link building, including automated reciprocal link building, link farming, comment and testimonial page spamming among others. Our client was a victim of testimonial page spamming and I'd like to share few tips on how to avoid comment and testimonial spam.

1. Get Akismet www.akismet.com -- The sheer number of spam that Akismet blocks is enough reason for you to install it. I read from other people's testimonial that this light script is blocking thousand of spam everyday from their blogs and it wouldn't hurt if you try it to your site that is being infested by spammers.

2. Use the Blog Script to its potential -- Most blog script out there including wordpress and blogger is equipped with spam fighting options. You can either disable the comment feature or enable moderation before comment or testimonial appear on your page.

3. If your site is developed from scratch, make sure your programmer included the feature to moderate testimonial or comment submission. This will allow you to review new submission and delete unwanted ones. We have this feature in this client's website but I believe they did toggle on the moderation option.

Finally, if spammers won't see your page, there's no way they can spam it. You can set your robots.txt NOINDEX option so it will not be crawled by visiting robots -- robots are automated software agents that seeks content on the internet, and from within individual web pages and is a vital part of how search engines operate.

To know more about how to fight spam, visit our website at http://www.iconcept.com.ph

Owen V. Cruz

Former Telecom Engineer / Systems Developer - Smart Communications Inc.
Former Product Development Engineer - Wataniya Telecoms, Kuwait
Co-founder - IBRAINS Technologies Corp. - IT and Telecom Contracting Firm
Co-founder - iCONCEPT Marketing and Advertising, Inc. - Website Design Firm
Co-founder - Fast Tech Security Management, Inc. - Security Agency
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