Did I Start a War?

[ron15]

I recently went though a round of firewall blocking access from China to my US blog.

The reason for the block was that there were a number of recurring hits that had a very high probability of being scrapper. There is very little, if any, reason for anyone outside the US to have a legitimate interest in my content.

Following the firewall blocking they came in via Google translation. I blocked Google translation.

After that they started using proxies. I blocked them each time they moved to a new one.

Now it seems they are upset. :) This being a new blog a couple of months old, I typically get about 2 or 3 spam comments a day that Askismet takes care of for me.

I just logged in and there was about 40 spam comments today, all from different IP's, all with either Bing, Google, or Facebook as the name link. It is obvious that it was a concerted effort.

I wonder if they are trying to make a statement. It was not my intention to start a war, just trying to protect my hard work.

[incrediBILL]

Welcome to my world.

You didn't start a war, you just stepped into the middle of one that's been going for years :)

I've been telling people for years how this goes down when speaking at PubCon about bot blocking and defending their content. People often think I exaggerate, and it's exactly as you described it, relentless from every direction. One mod from WebmasterWorld who sat on one of my panels even referred to my presentation as paranoid with a 'tightly wrapped tinfoil hat' - not. The scrapers want to make money off your content in the worst way possible because it's free money, and will stop at nothing to make it happen.

Enjoy!

[ron15]

It may very well be that they prize my content. Being new in a touch niche and having good, original content, must make it attractive to scrappers, since it gets little exposure. One of my posts did do very well since I scooped all the big industry watchers and ended up on the first page of Google for the effort.

But for the most part, at this point I'm getting very little natural search traffic from average visitors. A large portion of my traffic is from businesses in the industry, representatives watching over their business interests, competition, and bots. The low volume makes spotting unfavorable traffic easier.

Until the time comes that I gain trust in the engines algorithm, I'm going to do what I can to protect what I'm building. Its hard work, time consuming, and its mine. I made the choice early that I'll fight the battle, if need be.

[Staffa]

Welcome to the club.

Good for you to protect YOUR content, after all you made this content for the benefit of people interested in the subject and not for spammers and scrapers who will try to make money from your work.

If I were to detail everything I block for various reasons (spammers, scrapers, language barrier, etc) many webmasters would call me nuts but for me the days of 'I had nnn hits today' and later 'I had nnn page views today' are a) long gone and b) do the claimers realize that many of those hits and views are made by bots and not humans.
All I am interested in is that the humans who do visit happen to have an interest in the subject matter and may even find it useful - mission accomplished.

As an example, I have one site where a person's name is mentioned once on two pages, searching for that name - between " " - returns just two pages in the results from Google, my pages.
BTW I haven't received spam emails for several years - touch wood, it could start tomorrow, but it's doubtful ;o)

[incrediBILL]

See this thread and linked article for possible answers:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[RP_Joe]

You might want to checkout wp-spamfree. If they are bots posting comments, I think it works better than Askismet. It checks for cookies and javascript.