40,000 Spam Milepost

Here just on my personal website I have reached the 40,000 spam milepost. Over forty thousand spam comments have been filtered and deleted. Thanks to the Akismet plugin it is all automated and I don’t have to do anything. That’s one of the main reasons I chose WordPress over other blog platforms.

Network wide the spam blocks run into the tens of millions. From what I’ve read most spam is generated by a handful of people. The people that generate the spam don’t make money directly, they make money selling the service to other webmasters who think it will increase their rankings.

The recent proliferation of spam is in part from amateur spammers now using automated programs like Xrumer. My original article on Xrumer, which is quoted as a source now on Wikipedia, can be found here: Xrumer Link Scam Article.

Everyone’s tempted to make money – but do this one thing before you think about investing in an automated link spam program. Take any of the spam links you have seen generated by the program in the past and do a search on their anchor text or keywords. You’ll find they don’t rank. They are quickly banned. The money is not in the links, the money is in SELLING the service – which doesn’t work for long term SEO.

Someday I’ll post the gruesome details of my own experience and over zealous, xenophobic SEO. It doesn’t work anymore. And I’m glad it doesn’t. The web is much more useful now that most pedestrian black hat SEO has been fielded out.

I can tell you it is MUCH more enjoyable now to work on genuine service, than just trying to manipulate SERPS. It is never satisfying enough, you always need a little more. But helping people out, like this post here, is enjoyable on a minute to minute basis.

In a person’s last minutes of life, they will not think of how much money they made….