It seems that every single day I get more and more spam. By spam I mainly mean comment spam on my many blogs. I could just as easily complain about email spam, but that’s really another issue.

I’ve written about spam and spammers recently and the measures I’ve taken to combat spam on my blogs. Believe me I think I have the bots pretty much handled … it’s the human comment spammers that are driving me nuts.

Have you been seeing a steady increase in human generated comment spam on your blogs?

I think that one of the main sources of this comment spam is the free and paid comment software programs that have come out in the last year or so. These programs make it easy for people to find blog posts on certain topics, posts that are of certain page rank, and blogs that are dofollow. Now if people used these types of software properly – ie finding blog posts that related to their own websites or blogs and leaving real commentary on the post without trying to promote their own site or product it wouldn’t be that bad … but leaving “nice post” “I’m stumbling this” or “I’ve told all my relatives and friends about your article” type of comments while promoting a commercial site or commercial blog is just not right.

The other source of spam is of course all the do follow lists and directories. My own Do Follow Blogroll as well! Since I have several blogs is very easy for me to tell that someone is following a do follow list because they tend to hit almost all of my blogs one comment after the other from site to site. Some of the comments are fine … but the ones that are just quickly going through the list don’t seem to read the post they are commenting on and either copy whatever one of the last commenters said or leave the same comment on each blog! Bzzzzz – you’re deleted or worse – sent to akismet hell!

If you are interested in promoting your site and getting some back links do it properly! Either dip into your savings accounts and by some advertising slots or find sites that are similar to your own and build a relationship with the webmaster by leaving meaningful comments that add to the site.

Leaving comments that don’t make sense or self promote or that don’t add to the posts conversation will either be deleted from most blogs or ignored. Good comments that add to the conversation end up having their links visited by the site owner as well as those who read the comment.

So if you are coming here to spam my site(s) by leaving a comment that self promotes or that doesn’t add anything to the conversation ie “nice post” – be warned – I moderated heavily and I don’t like spammers. If you leave a meaningful comment and your site doesn’t lead to a sales page it will probably be accepted.

How do you handle spammers on your sites? Do you delete the comments? Mark them as spam by sending them to Akismet? Delete the url if the comment is semi-passable?