It’s Spam. Ignore It.
You want to interact with your users. Maybe you’ve just got a contact us form (or even just a mailto: link), maybe blog comments or even a message forum. It’s an important part of building your presence online.
As such, it’s quite the thrill the first time you see a comment or get an email. Hurray!
It’s spam. Ignore it. Seriously.
No matter how small you are, the bots and scripts are out there waiting to jump on your comments and your inboxes, and you will very quickly start getting junk. This site has only been up for maybe a month or two and the rate of junk to good stuff is about 8:1.
Why Me?
You’re a tiny little shop that just opened its doors and doesn’t even have any traffic yet, why would the spambots bother you? It’s nothing personal, really. Don’t forget that the web is a big place, and links have value. It’s not your blog that’s valuable by itself, its that link the bot wants to put on your site. Because if it does that 10,000 times, that makes the search engines think that the site being linked has more value than it actually does.
Is it all spam? All of it?
Well no, not all of it. You’ll certainly get some real comments in the mix. So how do you tell the difference? Mostly, read them. You’ll develop an ear very quickly for messages written by a real person, and those that have been written by a robot (and by that I mean a message-generating computer program, not an actual physical creation, in case that term confuses anybody).
Guidelines
* Comments that are completely generic, making no reference to the original post. “Great ideas here! Thank you for posting.” Spam. Almost always comes with a link, though sometimes you’ll find them without – those are tests, to see whether you let them through. If you do, the same bot will come back later and start putting in linked comments since it thinks you’re not moderating.
* Links. Especially, unrelated links. If you write a blog on Shakespeare, and people write comments with links to check mortgage rates or by Viagra, kill it. Kill it with fire.
* Garbage. Many bots are just bad, and generate broken links, misspelled words, and other errors. These are easiest to spot, and little more than an annoyance.
* Get Rich Quick. Anybody that offers, out of the blue, to share with you the secrets to making a million dollars online? Delete. One of the sites I work on got up and running a few weeks ago, then sent me an email he’d received in his inbox asking if it was real. It was to help him optimize his SEO. It was entirely generic, making no references to his site. Spam spammy spam. The truth of it is that most of the people trying to make money on the web these days are trying to do by selling you the secrets to making money on the web. So if anybody claims that they’re offering you something that will make you money, but it looks too good to be true? It is. Delete it.
* Stay on top of it! Want to know how to spot a blog that’s no longer maintained? You google for a topic, click through to a story, and that story which was posted a couple months ago has 3 relevant comments and then 27 comments that are Viagra ads. That’s a site that’s no longer being maintained, so if you were thinking about adding a comment, or emailing the author to ask a question, or even putting that blog in your list of feeds to watch, forget it. Not worth it.
Be patient. Audiences build. Nobody wants to be the first person to post on a story – but once somebody does step up and go for it, people follow along. It’s like being the first person to try out a new restaurant. Nobody wants to sit down at that very first table, but you don’t mind so much sitting down at the second table, because now you’re not alone. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll start to see the customers come around. Don’t get bummed out when 90% of it is junk in the early days, that happens to everybody. Just keep deleting.
