The content research and creation part of being a Blogger is time consuming enough. Then there is engaging with commenters, that of course adds more time, but is fundamental as it builds your community further which makes it all the more annoying when spam commenters seeking link credits constantly hit your blog.
What to do about blog spam? There are decisions to be made here that have a major effect on corporate blogging policy. What is our mark up policy? How do we define spam comments? What are our defences against spam?
An option is using rel="nofollow" to discourage spam commenting because there is supposedly no indexing influence assigned to a nofollow link and therefore no point either. However, this is not as black and white as the attribute would indicate. Many articles have been published and Wikipedia as ever has good stuff. Loren Baker also has posted extensively as has Michael Duz and even their conclusions differ in some areas as to how the search engines actually deal with rel="nofollow".
Other automated anti spam services like Akismet are available, which WordPress uses. In addition to Akismet WordPress versions 1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow attribute mentioned above to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc). However, there are several free plugins available that automatically remove the nofollow attribute like NoFollow Free for example should the administrator wish. Typepad AntiSpam developed in-house by Six Apart is now publicising itself as more effective than Akismet.
Whether these types of technology remain reliable and comprehensive enough for corporate blogs where the reputations at stake are more than just that of an individual blogger is something to be monitored. You can be sure as spam is spam, spammers are not just going to give up and staggeringly now Akismet claims that 84% of all comments are spam. See any parallels with email marketing here?
Having said all that what is best practise? KMP still believes that nothing can replace rigorous human moderation and in fact it should always be encouraged. Not all comments are spam and some comments simply add no value to your blog or forum. Useless but flattering comments should be weeded out as well as spam which requires human interaction. In addition can you convince your legal department that a mark up policy and/or automated services can be relied upon to pick up a slanderous comment? The well trained moderator should always have pride of place in the battle against blog spam.
