A recent article in PC World suggests that up to 80% of blogs contain offensive content. While the article discusses spam in the context of corporate internet browsing and reading offensive posts at work, a real issue for business bloggers is preventing spam on their corporate blogs.
If you have a blog, you’re probably aware of the attempts of spammers to place their content on your blog by submitting comments on different blog posts. They aren’t shy about submitting long, blatantly obvious spam comments. Case in point - since I enabled comments on my blog in late December 2006, spammers have attempted to submit almost 10,000 spam-ridden comments to my blog.
Of course, I don’t want these to appear in the blog, so I use the Akismet plugin for Wordpress to filter these out automatically. I moderate all comments that get past Akismet, allowing me to approve and display only those comments that are not spammy in nature.
If you have a corporate blog that isn’t protected by some sort of spam prevention method, your blog is probably already overrun with spam. Installing a spam filter can help you filter out comment spam and restore the true content of your blog.
So why should you block spam in your blog?
- Corporate firewalls and computer software often block sites with profanity and objectionable content. By filtering out comment spam, and by writing in a professional, business-like tone, you will ensure that your web site is accessible to a wide audience.
- Poor writing and comment spam make your blog look unprofessional. Stay on topic, keep content relevant and use professional language. Don’t make your readers wade through objectionable content to read comments from real readers.
