If you run a blog, you've seen spam comments by the thousands arrive in the Akismet spam basket. So many of these are filled with dozens and dozens of links to porn/pills/etc. type sites. I mean seriously, each of the spam comments is just a huge long list of keyword-rich anchor text. Although Akismet catches most of them, I still have to manually mark a few of them as spam each day. This monotonous process got me to thinking. What would make these spammers stop? (If anything). And then I thought...well...what if Akismet shared all of this info with Google and the other search engines?
I'm thinking that if Akismet shared its spam database with the search engines, and the search engines used that info to kick sites out of their indexes, would that be an incentive to stop the spamming? I would think there would need to be some basic rules in place to make sure as few false positives as possible ended up in the spam database, but I assume there are a few smart cookies that could handle that task.
Obviously, I also think there would need to be some sort of appeals process for the false positives that do sneak through, but on the whole, this might be a good way to rid the world of much of the blog comment spam that exists.
I have a feeling there will be at least 100 people telling me why this would be a terrible idea, and I'm certainly willing to hear the reasons why. I might not be thinking clearly, who knows? But some days...like today...I just wish I didn't have to see yet another link-laden spammy blog comment in my moderation panel.
About the Author: Donna Fontenot
