This big, cruel world is filled with all sorts of social rifts. Some of you are liberal while others are conservative. Some believe in God while others like to sleep in on Sunday. We’re deeply divided but there’s one thing we can all agree on: link spammers are a bag of dicks!
Your JoeDog is up to his armpits in spam. And if you’re a link spammer spamming this post, go /sbin/fsck yourself.
Google created these monsters. It awards points to sites with incoming links. But here’s the thing: it can’t be just any link. Back in the day, link-weenies created link farms to bump their SEO. A few years ago, the search engine giant started penalizing those type of links. As a result, link spammers now work overtime to add links to your website.
So they’re shitheads. But here’s the thing about these shitheads: they’re nicer than the average Internet. Gawker once chronicled a nasty flame war on a comment thread about a cake recipe. People are nasty but link spammers are nice.
They post compliments! Seriously, they have nothing but nice things to say about you or your site. They appeal to your ego with the hope that your vanity preserves their links.
Frankly, this makes them easier to root out of the comment queue. When I see, “Best site on the ….” kerplunk! I don’t need another word to know that’s spam. But if a comment begins, “Hey, asshole …” well, I need to keep reading because it’s probably legitimate commentary.
To combat this scourge, Your JoeDog uses Akismet. As a C-List nerdblogger, he can’t afford to give them much money but he can give them a linky! Oh! That’s two linkies. Wait, what? You’d rather have money. I give you guys $12.00 a year how much more do you want??!!
Akismet works pretty darn well. For each spammer who manages to find his way onto the comment queue, Akismet deletes hundreds of others ones. The company claims it’s saved Your JoeDog 52 days in comment management since he started using their service. That sounds about right.
Your JoeDog highly recommends Akismet and if your site actually makes money he encourages you to slip them a little more than $12.00 a year.