An action plan against link spam

[Rosalind]

After reading this article, it occured to me that we may not be as helpless as it sometimes seems against the tide of link spam:

[theregister.co.uk...]

I'd like to start off a checklist of things legitimate webmasters and bloggers can do to take back the web.

1. Clean up or get rid of abandoned guestbooks and comment pages. This probably doesn't apply to most people reading this, but I might as well cover the basics.

2. Build and use guestbooks that require the owner to approve messages that are posted (or at least to approve any links).

3. If you must have free-for-all comments, implement the "nofollow" tag. It's better than nothing, but "nofollowed" links can still deliver traffic. Multiplied over thousands of pages, that still amounts to traffic for the link spammers.

4. Consider building and using guestbooks that include a word filter. This way you can break links to sites with "casino" or "viagra" in the url, and so on.

5. Promote the above types of guestbook and comment pages.

6. Suggest the types of features described above to those who make guestbooks and comment pages.

7. Link spammers make a lot of use of proxy servers. Trace IPs and inform the owners of the way their proxies are being abused.

8. Consider banning those proxies that fail to clean up their acts. Alternatively (but involving more programming) you could allow them access, but forbid them from posting comments.

That's all I can think of for now. Has anyone got anything to add?

[pmkpmk]

Open proxies are not bad by definition. I'm not only referring to privacy issues, but for example a proxy server in a given country is the ONLY RELIABLE way to check if your AdWords ads are coming right for that country and who else is advertising. It's also the onyl way around geotargeting sites.

[troels nybo nielsen]

Nice list, Rosalind. A couple of additions:

9. If you have a forum you ought to moderate it carefully. If it is a large forum you should urge posters to report link spam when they see it.

10. You may have an old forum that never took off and that you don't use any more. Some large portals make it very easy for inexperienced people to create forums. Many of those forums are left alone unmoderated for years and are easy targets for link spammers. If you have such a forum you should either look after it or delete it.

11. If your firewall is attacked it might be a good idea to report those attacks to the ISPs. Most of the attacks come form unprotected computers that have been turned into zombies. Such zombies can be used for many things, including distribution of link spam.