Over the spring and summer, this blog was attacked viciously by spam bots that filled up the comments with a never-ending stream of links.
Akismet seems to have abetted much of it, but I imagine it will be a continuing problem. I do recommend Akismet.
Having worked in Search Engine Optimization I understand what spammers are doing and how they make a living doing it (still hate ‘em) but I really do wish they would leave my blog well enough alone!
Since practically the only place I advertise my blog is Twitter, I am driven to the conclusion that the spam attack on my pool originated from people following me, or people I follow. I use the term ‘people’ loosely.
No surprise. Twitter is a cesspool of spam agents. I haven’t tried to figure it out in any quantiative sense, but I would be unsurprised to learn that the majority of my ‘followers’ are spam bots. Lately, a fair number of them are sex bots.
That’s the problem with Twitter. Or, rather, it is one problem with Twitter.
There are also many marketer-types on Twitter. Some of them are cool. Others are essentially doing the same thing that spammers do: Following everybody in the hopes that a percentage of everybody will follow them. Afterall, number of followers = amount of awesome…. right?
Well, it works. Spammers apply this same logic . They try to put links/content everywhere with the expectation of pissing off the majority of people. However, a small percent will work for them, and that percent keep spamming profitable.
I don’t really have a point, except to say ’sorry about the spam’. Spamming is a reality of the internet. Spamming isn’t going to go away. But we can draw from the technique of spamming one conclusion: ‘quantity’ doesn’t equal ‘quality’. That goes for content, links, popularity, and everything else.