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Where Did All the Spammers Go?

By Melissa Markham on August 13, 2008 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Actually, I am not complaining, but I want to share an observation. It is not uncommon for me to receive 30 or 40 spam comments a day. Because I never could get recaptcha to work with Movable Type 4.0, I just have to go in and delete all of them. And many of them are embarrassing to even have to glance at!

But something has changed. I had appealed to Google to review my page ranking (they had slapped me down to 0 from a 3 because of the fact that I was writing for money on my blog). They reviewed and gave me a page ranking of 2, but now, for some unknown reason, I am back to a 0 even though my traffic remains the same. Maybe they see the word review on my blog (book reviews, movie reviews, product reviews) and just think I am getting paid...but I am not. Sometimes authors send me books for free in exchange for a review, but no money is exchanging hands.

Anyway, about 10 days ago, my page rank dropped to 0.

Then last week when Site Meter went off line, I was trying to figure out what was causing my blog page to crash. I started with newer things I had added...flickr and a flag counter. I deleted them, but still crashing. Then I deleted truth laid bear code because I tried to get to their website and could not. I did this after finding out that there were blogs and websites crashing everywhere!

Then I deleted technorati and site meter and viola...my problems were solved. I later found out that Site meter was the problem, but I decided not to add the things back in that I deleted. Though I will probably go back and put my flickr widget in because I like it. The other widgits stroke my ego, but really don't add anything to my blog, so I dropped them. I do have google analytics running in the background, so if I get really curious, I can always go check my traffic there.

Interestingly, my average number of daily visitors remains around 50. But my spammers has dropped to almost nothing. Yesterday, there were five spam comments, today when I logged in, there were only two. Is that crazy or what????

I wonder which of those services that I deleted (and maybe it is all of them) that people have been using to find my blog and spam it...

Just some food for thought!