Spam sandwich

[Sofie]

They're impossible for me to read. I've given up on Google Mail for that reason - can't read the image and the one where they tell you the letters - that's as clear as mud!

[Lou]

Some are ok to read...Like on the postcode finder website (I use this a lot for work) the letters are really clear and easy to read. It's the websites where they're all swirly and joined up that I can't read at all. I normally guess and just hope for the best!

[Larry]

Hmm, we’re getting an average of 100 spam posts per day now and it’s quite frustrating as we have to trawl through them all so we don’t accidentally disapprove a genuine new member’s post. Some of them are quite sneaky and their initial post contains no advert or link and others have taken to copying an earlier post from a genuine member.

The majority of the spam is just trash and I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever respond to them but then again, it’s all done automatically and costs them nothing so I suppose they consider it worth a go. One of the regular spam posters is titled ‘funny pictures’ and some of them are quite amusing but there doesn’t seem to be any link or advertising so I have to wonder what their motive is.

[Sofie]

I've just gone through 65 posts waiting for approval. 65 of them were spam.

[Larry]

I’ve mentioned in another topic that I’ve built a couple of websites and they’ve been up and running for a couple of months now. On one of these sites I’ve posted a short story and left the protocol to allow readers to leave a comment. This particular website is not highly ranked on Google although it is on Bing and Yahoo. Incredibly, I’ve started to receive spam (porn in this case) in the comment box.

What I can’t quite get my head around is that Google removed my site when I first posted the short story because it had some expletives in the text. I have since edited and removed the expletives and in due course Google re-indexed the site although at a lower ranking. Since receiving the porn spam, my site has disappeared from the rankings again – how unfair is that?

The Google crawlers (bots) are supposed to be pretty sophisticated. They can’t identify picture content but they are supposed to be able to identify bogus and illegal sites as opposed to genuine ones. Even more surprising is why they allow pornographic sites in the first place – why don’t they just remove them from their indexing?

[MrsEmmaCato]

Even more surprising is why they allow pornographic sites in the first place – why don’t they just remove them from their indexing?

That's totally unfair that your site got removed due to porn spam which isn't even down to you, yet they allow porn sites!

[Matt]

Since receiving the porn spam, my site has disappeared from the rankings again – how unfair is that??

That really sucks Larry. I've never managed to get a site to rank highly on google and have had to resort to shelling out £££'s a month on adwords, so I know what an achievement it is, and equally how important it is in this kind of venture. To have a great ranking runined by spam comments is devastating. Would it be benificial to disable the comments section of the site? This would be a shame as the nice, or constructive comments can't be made but at least it stops the spam knocking you out.

[Larry]

From stuff I’ve read, the Google bots have a sort of gut reaction to any spam links and remove the site immediately they detect it, check it out thoroughly and provided it’s clean, eventually return it to its original ranking. It’s not quite as human as that but basically, it means I should eventually get my ranking back but it could take at least two weeks. Ironically, this website continues to climb the Bing rankings and is now top of page 2 (also near the top of page 2 on Yahoo), which is very gratifying.

I did try Adords but Google have now moved the goalposts to the extent that they will not allow affiliate marketers to advertise even though they say they will accept affiliate websites provided they are advertising at least 3 variations (suppliers) of the product. I’ve tried several approaches to this but each one has been rejected.

I don’t really want to remove the comment option because, like you say, it’s nice to get some feedback but also, every comment, as with Facebook clicks, goes towards improving my site rankings.

[Larry]

My writing website has just returned in the Google rankings for one of my key phrases and blimey, it’s No 1 on Page 1. Mind you, going on past experience when a similar thing has happened, it will probably drop back a bit once it all settles – still, very encouraging.