'bots never sleep...

Posted by Webmaster on 17 April 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: search engines, robots, spiders, bots, spam

..but they don't buy products or services either.

We have recently suffered a spate of comments from spammers or spam 'bots. On the face of it, it seemed a bit of a pain. We ike blogs and comments, but we really hate spammers. Oh, what to do.

We've changed the setup a tad to suppress comments before approval and also to use a spam checker. All very easy to do and seems to be working better.

But this recent attention got me thinking. Spammers and spam 'bots use very similar mechanisms to search engine bots for finding and posting spam. They probably just crawl the web, looking for blogs and enabled comments, then do their worst.

This led me to think that if these spam 'bots are finding our site, so too are the search engine 'bots and spiders.

I know we get visited by our good friend GoogleBot on a regular basis, but sometime it's difficult to see where our content is propagating. The spammers seem to suggest our content is getting out there quickly at least.

I then started to consider the many calls, e-mails and requests we receive from companies offering us services. I know you can get data from Companies House and various list brokers, but I think a lot of the attention we get from link exchange, software and service providers comes from our google and other search engine rankings.

We do get genuine traffic of course but sometimes it seems a little more of it is people trying to sell to us?

Here's to less spam...