Guestbook Spam

Like most naive new webmasters, I was thrilled at the prospect of adding a guestbook to my site several years ago. After all, a guestbook is often the first true element of interactivity that most websites have. Naturally, though, my excitement died down when I realized that 99.9% of all comments were spam. It wouldn’t be until more recently that I understood the significance of links and the dangers to a site’s search engine placement that this sort of spamming posed.

You may be wondering, then, why I keep my guestbook around despite the obvious risks inherent in having one. After all, the site is much more mature now with a great deal more traffic coming to it. This only escalates the issue, as more search engine placement and traffic means more interest in spammers to get their links up by any means possible. The truth is that, yes, my guestbook is spammed ferociously. I get literally dozens of comments on it every day, all of which are blatant spamming attempts.

The answer is simple. I keep my guestbook around as a spam trap. Every time a spammer leaves a comment, the form logs their IP address. Over time, I have collected quite a large list of repeat offenders, and have regularly updated my server configuration to block their activities on my site. This leads to higher quality traffic and less spam overall.

Of course, the crux of this practice is being able to moderate all comments before they are made live, which WordPress allows me to do. Any guestbook that doesn’t allow tight control over comments is obviously a grave risk to the site. However, with a little expertise, you’ll find that a guestbook can function much like a fly zapper, ridding you of troublesome and potentially hazardous spammers.

Unfortunately, many spammers do cloak their IP addresses and otherwise foil attempts at tracing them. Thus, one can never be entirely rid of them and may, very occassionally, inadvertently block a legitimate hit. However, making the lives of spammers a little more difficult will still tend to reduce the overall bad traffic to a website. If they encounter resistance, spammers are more likely to move on than to beat their brains against a smart webmaster’s attempts to block them. After all, success in their “profession” depends on 1000’s of successful spam links, not one.