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If you have a blog with reasonably well conceived content, and have had this blog for any length of time, you will undoubtedly encounter content scrapers, people bottom-feeding scumbags who republish rip-off your content either from your feed or from your site, to populate their own "made for Adsense" sites. Often the only recourse left to you is to file a DMCA complaint, which can take over a month to resolve.

If the content scraper is hotlinking your images (pulling the images directly from the files on your server) you can at least shut down the images with a command in your htaccess file if your site is hosted on an Apache server. This is sort of a sledgehammer approach, but if they have scraped your entire site (which happened to me recently), it's a lot easier than changing the file names of every image on your site and rewriting your html code for every entry.

Updated February 9, 2007. Originally posted in 2004 and updated several times since.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Types of Blog Spam

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1. Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam.
2. Comment spam flooding. The spammer uses an automated computer bot to flood your blog with comment spam messages, up to hundreds in an hour. The spammer doesn't necessarily leave a URL, but can leave garbage messages, almost like a graffiti artist. The comment spam can put a severe load on the server hosting your blog software to the point that it crashes.
3. Trackback Spam. Spammers have discovered how to take advantage of Trackback. TrackBack spam is very similar to comment spam. The spammer sends TrackBack pings to your site that direct viewers to a totally unrelated URL.
4. Referral spam. The spammer links to your site from their site, and then pings your site through their link, thus creating a reference and link to their site on the statistics referral log of your website. When you are reviewing your stats and see the reference to an odd site (ex. Paris Hilton), clicking on the link takes you to their site. Many people list "referrals" on their site publicly, so by spamming referral logs, not only does the spammer get a link on your referral log (which is picked up by Google) but may even get a link on your main page.

How can you fight spam on your blog?

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I’ve dumped Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective.

Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated’. This was where comments could be held for human approval before being published, and tools like SpamLookup and MT-Blacklist could hold comments here if they thought they might be spam but couldn’t be sure.

With 3.2x, trackbacks can also be moderated, but a new third status has been added for both: junk. Now, rather than deleting spam outright, you’ll find plugins send it sent here instead. That way, if you have a false positive - a comment that is seen as being spam but isn’t - you can retrieve it.

The junk status also has a rating system, and plugins can adjust the rating for an individual comment or trackback. The rating is between 10 and -10 - comments with a negative score are junked, otherwise they are moderated or published. You’ll find that SpamLookup can reduce the rating of comments that it thinks are spam, but also add points if, say the comment has no links or has been posted with a URL that has already been accepted before.