Blog Comments, Comments Spam and Filtering

Each day I put my thoughts into a blog post to share with you. One of the wonderful things about the blog platform is that you can post a comment and share your thoughts. Some of you send me comments via e-mail and I strongly encourage you to post them as comments on the blog instead. That way all readers can benefit from your contribution and my answer, if needed, to your comment. As each blog post is also posted on the Graphics Unleashed Facebook page, you can comment via Facebook if that is your preference.

Some of you have wondered why a comment may not always be immediately visible on the blog. Unfortunately there are people (no, not the regular readers of the blog) who post blatant comment spam. Along with their comment comes one or more terms hyperlinked to a spammy Web site. The spammers do this as a form of SEO, though it is definitely considered "black hat" SEO. Below is an example of a recent comment received (with the product link removed).

I enjoyed reading your nice blog. I see you offer priceless info. Stumbled into this blog by chance but I'm sure glad I clicked on that link. You definitely answered all the questions I've been dying to answer for some time now. Will definitely come back for more of this.

I won't repeat the product to which they linked, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the blog post on which it was posted. Look carefully at that comment. It is completely generic and could be used on any blog post because it says nothing specific about the post. Sadly these comments are not uncomment and they are are similarly vague. You won't see these comments appear on the blog because I moderate the comments and report these comments as spam to Google so they can block the idiots in the future. This means it may take a short time before legitimate comments appear. Please don't let this slight delay stop you from sharing your thoughts on a post.

Since we are talking about filtering, I wanted to mention how filtering can sometimes fail and block good content. The CorelDRAW Web site pulls in the content from this blog and a number of others. Users can then click on a particular blog post and they will be brought to the full post at Graphics Unleashed. I can certainly understand things being filtered as there may be a post about a competitor of Corel's. Strangely my weekly posts about free fonts, most recently Shock Therapy BB Free Fonts, haven't appeared on their site since early June 2012. It just makes no sense that posts telling users about free fonts would be something that should be filtered. This is just one more reason to make sure to subscribe to the Graphics Unleashed Blog via e-mail so that you receive every post.

As always, I encourage you to share your thoughts on the subject. Unless you are a spammer and then we really don't want to hear anything.