What Is Spam and How to prevent It the right way?

How to stop spam?

Spam, spammer and spamming; what are these words mean?

• Spam – is an unsolicited message or messages that you received usually in your email from unknown sender.
• Spammer  – the person responsible of sending unsolicited messages via email or in all media outlet.
• Spamming – is an act of doing or sending spam messages.

Types of spam?

• Spam email – this is the most popular one. If you are having an email account from Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL, everyday you received spam emails. Some are asking you to buy something with great discounts. The other might offer you free services, free dating and more. There are also few, asking you to help them and offers a great amount of money, if you do (be careful with this type of spam).

• Spam comments – when the blogosphere started to gain popularity. Then, ten years ago, spamming techniques also evolved. Thus, spam comments gave birth. The mean goal of this is to get link juice to their new blogs or site to improve SEO. However, since Google started to update its algorithm this method is no longer viable. But still many are using  spam comments to showcase their product and services. Especially when they don’t have your email address. Their comments are usually out-of-the-topic and full of links.

• Spam websites – Like spam comments, spam website created to promote spammer’s products and services. On the contrary, some also use it to break other legitimate sites. By copying its original contents and post it on spam websites to add toxic links on quality sites. Most of this sites are having less content, untargeted niche and low quality content. However, there are also spam websites that produce hundreds of articles a day. Again, by copying quality and original content from legitimate sites and paste it on their own site as if they own content.

Spam samples

Spam Email – this is just one of so many spam or junk emails that I received everyday. I highlighted the title which already look illicit. It seems that the spammer is using an icloud account but that’s not conclusive. Outlook filtered it as junk. Be careful not click the link it provides.

Spam comments – these are just a few from hundreds of spam comments that my site received. I’m just glad of having Akismet plug-in that automatically filtered spam comments.

If you observed, the spammer leaves a flattering comments with their links. Some are using wrong spelling and their comments doesn’t add value to the post topic.

Spam website – this site copied everything from one of my post and put it on his website as if his own article. As what you can see from the post title up to the way I write, it’s a complete resemblance of my article. What to do if you encounter this problem. I will tell what I did, in the later part of this post.

How to prevent spam?

Practically, you cannot stop spammers from getting you spammed, especially on your emails. But even free email services today are smart enough to block spam emails. In my experience Outlook spam filters are excellent.

To protect your email and prevent spammers from getting your email address. Follow the guide below:

• Do not publicly display your email address in your social media networks.

• Use spam filters if it is available in your email accounts.

• Block spammers in the very first time they send you an email and put their emails in the trash.

• Before giving your email address to any website, check their privacy policy first. Make sure they don’t sell your email address.

• Do not download free software from the site you do not trust. It may include spyware that gathers your computer’s personal information including your email address.

• Do not open any email attachments or click any links unless you know the sender and you are expecting it.

• Consider using two email address one as receiver/forwarder and a permanent one. Once your forwarder email started to get spam emails you can easily close it. Without hurting your private email address.

How to protect your website or blog from spam comments?

• Install a captcha plug-in as your first line of defense. While it’s not 100% accurate, but at least you will get rid of spam bots.
• Install Akismet plug-in. It will do the work and will save you ample time than manually moderating comments yourself. All you have to do is to approve comments that passed Askimet spam filters.

How to fight spam websites or content scraping?

This is the toughest challenge that I ever had. If you’ve been blogging for years, you know how duplicate contents may affect your site. You cannot just report to Google  or to DMCA right away.

• First you have to send an email to the spammer. Ask him/her to remove the duplicate content.
• When there is no contact email which is always the case, do a WHOIS look-up to see the domain registrar and the host.
• Then file a DMCA complaint with the hosting company or with Google.

If none of the above worked for  you, a legal action may be appropriate. But it’s costly, right? To some bloggers they use the “do nothing approach” instead. Anyway you cannot prevent anyone from copying your content. For authority sites it may be fine but for start-up blog it may be dangerous.

So, my first approach is I installed a TYNT script. Once someone copied my content TYNT will add a link of attribution at the bottom of each post. Then, I used to interlink every articles that related to each other. So that, when the spammer copy my article, he/she will also copy the related links that points to my site. Thus, Google will know that it is me who made that article.

Bottom line

In my experience, there is no way to that we can stop spam and spammers by 100%. But someway or another by following the guide above you can lessen the ill effects of spam. Prevention still better than cure, by not giving away your email it will cut 60% chances of getting spammed.

Spam comments can also be eradicated by using the right and trusted plug-in. The content scrappers are a bit hard to handle but using simple techniques such as TYNT and interlinking may  of great help.

Any anti-spam technique that you want share with us? Feel free to comment below.