Hate Spam! Love Users – Stop Spammers using your Site for their gain

If you like to give your users the chance to post feedback on your website, whether it is related to a product, the level of service they received or simply just for you to engage with them on a new level, you need to make sure that you protect yourself from the internet spammers who lay in wait.

Spam appearing on your site is not only a bad thing for the general user experience, but it can also have a negative effect on your natural ranking positions if the search engines see it and then deem that your site is being used for spam promotion, thus breaching their webmaster guidelines.

Spammers seem to get smarter with every passing day, developing new techniques to get information on your site. This means that you need to ensure that you take every possible measure to stop them. With the advancements in the computer “spam bots” the spammers use to fill in online forms, manual moderating is not enough now. You could receive thousands of requests each day and filtering out the relevant requests from spam requests could be a massively time intensive task.

One thing that spammers have not been able to overcome is the use of reCAPTCHA when submitting forms. reCAPTHCA’s are uniquely generated images that need to be interpreted and then the words they show typed into the page before it can be submitted.

Like the search engines, spam bots have issues understanding images when they visit your site, as they can read text but don’t have the “eyes” to see and understand the image, this stops the spammers being able to submit the form and spam your site. As the images used on the form are unique with each individual page load the spammers have not found a way to overcome this solution for reducing spam.

With the current speed of development in the online marketplace im sure that this solution will not be infallible forever, however at the minute reCAPTHCA seems to be one of the best ways to reduce spam landing on your site. For more information on reducing spam and the effect it can have on your site, contact one of the SEO team at OMG Search.