A Personal Appeal to Victims of Blog Spam

If you’re anything like me, you have more than one blog and get multiple daily spam comments. You curse a little under your breath and delete these comments, imagining the whole time that the mouse clicks are white-hot daggers sizzling as you plunge them into the spammers eyeballs…

Ahem! Now where was I? Oh yeah, my appeal.

It’s time for us bloggers to stop our whimpy-assed bitching and moaning about spammers and do something proactive about them. Lets face it, people. When we passively delete spam comments and hope the spammers just go away, or take the initiative to throw together a plugin or script that automates the spam catching, all we’re really doing is giving the spammers the initiative to be more creative.

You see, spamming is a numbers game. If Guido the greasy spammer sends 10,000,000 (ten million) spam comments out per week and .01% of those comments “stick,” that’s 100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand!) links he gets back to his AdSense riddled, affiliate link stuffed, toolbar downloading, porn soaked, malware installing cockroach infested, ringtone pushing, freeweb space hosted, anonymous cockroach heaven of a website.

And Guido is getting rich because he’s getting close to half a million links to his sites per month, or about 6 million per year.

6 million links. If one person visits during the year for every 10 links, and 1% of those people spends $20 within that year - Greasy Guido just made $120,000. That’s a six figure income that puts him in the top 10% of earners in North America.

And allow me to enlighten you about something folks: The greasy Guidos out there are making a Hell of a LOT more a year from spamming you than THAT. The numbers I used were woefully underestimated.

Now I ask you this - Is cursing under your breath and imagining the sounds of sizzling brain matter going to make a difference to Guido’s business?

So what’s the real solution to combatting blog spam?

Is it to report them to their hosting companies and domain registrars? Not really. While this may shut down some newbie who is too clueless to know they were spamming in the first place, it has 0 effect on the Greasy Guidos. These guys have servers all over the globe and bulk register accounts for domain names.

A more direct approach is needed. We need to hit them where it hurts most. We need to go to some of their pages, open the source code and record their AdSense publisher IDs, their affiliate program IDs, their clickbank IDs, their Amazon IDs and whatever other things we find hidden in their pages, then we need to write an email to each company, include the URL of the spammers page and their ID and a screenshot of the spam comment waiting for moderation in your blog dashboard and send it off.

We all need to take a half an hour and do this a minimum of once per week.

Here is some more of my modest number crunching:

If 10,000 bloggers did this once per week, Google AdSense, Amazon, Clickbank, CJ, Shareasale, Nextag, Shopping.com, etc., etc., would have no other choice but to sit up and take notice. They would be getting hundreds, if not thousands of blog spam complaints every week and they would see immediately who the problem affiliates were.

A spam complaint here and there is not going to do it. A massive amount of complaints will.

Then, after about 3 months (you have to wait for big companies to acknowledge problems), we band together and say one of 2 things:

1. Company A, B, C and F have shut down X amount of spammers and they’re the good guys, or

2. Company D & E have done nothing yet. The spam is still relentlessly flowing in so they obviously think spammers generate a large enough portion of their sales to ignore their own affiliate guidelines and TOU, and support the spam as a viable way to do business.

Edit: Below are 2 screenshots I took. The first is of a spam comment notification I got from one of my blogs. The second is the result of visiting the URL, after I reported the spammers. (click each image for a larger version.)

Now, while this is just an example of a url service shutting down a member and that spammer will move to a different service, it works nonetheless. But it’s time to hit the spammers with the real bullets and not just blanks.

Who’s with me?