I’ve written about the importance of comments when it comes to blogging. As a blogger, you’ll be known by the comments you leave and receive. Comments, after all, are a great way to get important user feedback from your readership. Unfortunately, rogue blog comments on a blog can also be a source of frustration for bloggers because they are an emerging spam platform.

Spam, whether it’s in your inbox, your blog comments or the keywords on your site, is a friend to no one. It creates “noise” where “signal” ought to be, and makes it harder for visitors to find your site.

Spammers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to deceive the search engine spiders, and programmers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to frustrate rogue blog comments. However, developing an algorithm that can reliably detect a rogue blog comment is much easier said than done.

So as a blogger, how can you reduce the number of rogue blog comments you receive? Matt Cutts, from Google addressed the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference last week and suggested that bloggers should build trust mechanisms into their blogs, and blog programmers should incorporate methods whereby legitimate comments can be distinguished quickly from spam.

One suggestion was to require commenters to provide a valid email address, essentially establishing an account on the blog. Some type of authentication, to verify that the poster is actually human is another way. You may have seen Captcha on a blog or e-commerce site. It delivers a difficult-to-read string of numbers and/or letters that the user has to type in and submit before being allowed to comment or continue with a submission. Other similar technologies require the user to pick out certain photographs or answer a simple question. These activities are remarkably simple for a human to perform but boggle the spambots.

Cutts suggested that hosted blogging solutions are also a good way to reduce your status as a target. A hosted solution is monitored and updated with the latest patches and software versions (you hope!) and tends to be less vulnerable to known attacks.

He also pointed out that Google has developed a Webmaster resource that can help tired, overwhelmed or inexperienced Webmasters with tools like an auto-notification that alerts you if your site is being spammed by rogue blog comments, and stats to help you understand where your traffic is coming from.

In any event, it’s good to keep an eye on your comments (or moderate them) and delete irrelevant ones when they show up. Relevance is big with Google, and it’s a good bet that a blog that’s loaded up with rogue blog comments will get deprecated in the SERPs pretty quickly.

Photo Credit: Helene GP