Why Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free
By Jonathan Bailey • Apr 9th, 2007 • Category: Articles, PreventionA recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site. (Note: See updated information below about the Blogspot study)
It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.
Though there have been spam attacks in the past, the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as Typepad also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what Wordpress.com does is very rare for a free service.
To find out how Wordpress.com achieved this, I emailed Automatic’s founder, Matthew Mullenweg. The answer was very surprising.
A Technological Edge
Automattic, in addition to creating Wordpress.com, created the anti-comment spam plugin Akismet.
Akismet works by taking comments submitted to a site and forwarding them to Akismet’s servers. Akismet then, using a series of tests and filters, determines if the comment is legitimate, spam or something in between. Spam comments are filtered out, gray comments are held for moderation and legitimate comments are posted.
Akismet is available for free for personal use on any Wordpress blog with an API key, not just those hosted by Wordpress.com. To date, Akismet has stopped over one billion spam comments and is used on thousands of blogs, including this one.
Both the Wordpress.com site and Mullenweg hint that Akismet is one of their tools for keeping spam blogs off of Wordpress.com. Though both are vague with their descriptions as to how it works, one likelihood is that any caught comment spam originating or pointing to a Wordpress.com flags the site for inspection.
If true, this effectively turns comment spamming, one of the most popular means of promoting a spam blog, against the person doing it. Comment spamming goes from being a tool to help search engines find a blog to a means for administrators to easily identify the blogs that are likely junk.
That would be an interesting reversal of fortune for spammers and a very intelligent use of a seemingly unrelated technology.
Goodbye, Adsense
In late 2005, Wordpress.com took what some considered an extreme step and banned Google Adsense as well as other advertising networks from its service. As of this writing, there is no way to add any advertisements to a Wordpress.com hosted blog, other than “discreet” links, without a paid VIP membership.
This is obviously a tremendous deterrent to spam blogs, many of which rely upon Google Adsense to make money. This is in stark contrast to Blogspot, which makes it very easy to add Adsense ads to your blog and encourages members to do so.
Though Google’s reasons for doing this are clear, it is how they make money from the service, the prevalence of Adsense has undoubdtedly been a major contributor to the deluge of spam that has befallen the service. That is also why Mullenweg, in a comment on TechCrunch, said the following:
We’re considering ad options for the future, but for now disallowing adsense has been a huge help in keeping splogs off the system and hasn’t gotten much pushback from regular folks, only aspiring pro-bloggers. (Who should probably be on WordPress.org anyway.)
While it is true that this has no impact on the spam bloggers that are solely interested in using the splogs to gain search engine ranking via outbound liks, this missing functionality does a great deal to deter many of the laziest and least sophisticated spam bloggers out there.
All in all, while the lack of simple monetization might be a hurdle for some would-be Wordpress.com users, it has played a critical role in keeping the service free of spam blogs.
The Real Difference
But while Mullenweg was clearly pleased with the role that Akismet and other tools played in stopping spam, he put the greatest difference on the human element.
According to him, Automattic takes spam very seriously and always has and that, in his view, makes the greatest difference of all. In his email to me he said the following:
If you ever come across something we host that’s spam just drop the link there and someone will look at it within an hour or so.
Akismet and a few other internal tools help, but I think it’s mostly that we take splogs pretty seriously and respond accordingly..
Mullenweg encourages people to use the “Report as Spam” feature in the dashboard across the top of all Wordpress.com blogs to report any instance of spam. He says that all reports of spam are tracked and followed up on swiftly.
This is much simpler and more effective than Google’s complicated and practically useless reporting procedure.
This, in Mullenweg’s view, has kept spam from establishing a foothold on the service and kept Wordpress.com relatively spam-free when compared to its competitors. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep it that way.
Conclusions
The good news in all of this is that it is possible to run a large-scale, popular and free blogging service that is relatively free of spam. The bad news is that there is no magic bullet in any of this.
Running such a service requires a great deal of commitment both from the people who run the service and from the community that uses it. It requires investing both resources and manpower into combating spam while having a genuine dislike for it. It even requires, in some cases, sacrificing features that legitimate users may want in order to make the service less appealing to the spam blogging community.
It also means that it may be far too late for Blogspot and similar services to turn the tide against spam. Though Wordpress.com seems to easily be able to keep up with new spam that comes in, it appears that, if over three quarters of your results are junk, that the reversing the tide is all-but-impossible.
However, if Google were to take the simple, but drastic, step of banning Adsense on Blogspot, the effect on spam blogs would be drastic. However, the effect on their legitimate bloggers would be equally dramatic, causing many of them to turn away from the service.
This puts Google, and the other free blogging services, in a very tough bind. In order to effectively combat spam, they need to make sacrifices that will, most likely, cause them to lose legitimate customers as well as spammers. It almost comes down to a choice between being a spam haven and having their entire business model destroyed.
In that regard, spam blogs are like a cancer, often easily treated if caught and attacked early, but incurable if allowed to go on to long. Sadly, Blogger, AOL Hometown and MSN Spaces may be beyond any hope of recovery.
This is an issue I will be revisiting some time later this week.
Update: This article has really taken off. An appearance on Techmeme as well as Matt Mullenweg’s blog have really drawn a great deal of attention to this. So welcome to everyone who is visiting this site for the first time. Feel free to look around some and subscribe to the feed if you wish.
I did want to take a moment and respond to one very astute commenter who pointed out that all is not what it seems with the Blogspot study. As it turns out, the methodology of the study is both buried and confusing. It turns out that 77% of Blogspot blogs are spam for spam-friendly keywords. It is not a reference to the number of spam blogs on the service over all.
However, after thinking about it, I realized that a study of the blogs on Blogspot would be almost useless as Blogspot, in addition to splogs, is choked down with with inactive and abandoned blogs, the same as with any free blogging service or free Web service in general.
A better study would be to look at the percentage of active blogs on the service, something that can be determined, at least with some distinction, but the number of outgoing pings. A study from February of this year looked at exactly that and found that 51% of all pings from Blogspot were spam (Note: According to Pete, this study was taken before Blogspot began pinging new entries by default, it may show bias to spammers as they might be more likely to switch on the pinging feature. We will have to wait and see when a new study comes out.).
This means that over half of all new posts created and pinged out over Blogspot are junk. Though not the 77% mentioned earlier, that is still a tremendous problem. The fact remains that Blogger is, quite clearly, overrun with spam blogs and is unlikely to recover any time soon, not without making drastic changes.
My thanks to Pete for pointing out the error.
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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Oh…
And they do not allow me to login to claim authorship!
I’m starting to now like Blogger…
Julie
Oh…
And they do not allow me to login to claim authorship!
I’m starting to now like Blogger…
Julie
“not” like… sorry moderator.
“not” like… sorry moderator.
My website wasn’t on Blogger, but the person who copied my post was on Blogger. The person removed the post, but then made a new post with insults and lies. I let it go and did not post a rebuttal — right now that website is about 200-300 results down for my name, writing anything about it on my blog would have just brought more attention to the post.
I believe part of the reason for the upset is another blog on WordPress was shut down because of copying another one of my posts, and the WP and Blogger blogs were people that knew each other, if not the same person.
My website wasn’t on Blogger, but the person who copied my post was on Blogger. The person removed the post, but then made a new post with insults and lies. I let it go and did not post a rebuttal — right now that website is about 200-300 results down for my name, writing anything about it on my blog would have just brought more attention to the post.
I believe part of the reason for the upset is another blog on WordPress was shut down because of copying another one of my posts, and the WP and Blogger blogs were people that knew each other, if not the same person.
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The problem is that wp.com is not nearly splog free as implied by Automattic staff and others. The correct statement should be wordpress.com will usually remove a splog upon notification, unlike blogspot and the others. Logging in and clicking on the ‘Next Blog’ arrow at the upper right of the blue admin bar will show you tons of splogs. I got bored, hit it twenty times and got eleven splogs or blogs that violate the ToS in some way. (Usually sidebar adverts.)
It’s a far cry from the 70 to 80% other services are quoted as being but it’s not completly empty of them either.
The problem is that wp.com is not nearly splog free as implied by Automattic staff and others. The correct statement should be wordpress.com will usually remove a splog upon notification, unlike blogspot and the others. Logging in and clicking on the ‘Next Blog’ arrow at the upper right of the blue admin bar will show you tons of splogs. I got bored, hit it twenty times and got eleven splogs or blogs that violate the ToS in some way. (Usually sidebar adverts.)
It’s a far cry from the 70 to 80% other services are quoted as being but it’s not completly empty of them either.
As an aside, I would love to know which plugin is doing the ability to edit the comments.
As an aside, I would love to know which plugin is doing the ability to edit the comments.
DrMike: That’s the reason for the “virtually” statement. I don’t think any large site is 100% spam free. I just think that some are havens for spammers, such as Blogspot, and others are not, such as Wordpress.
As far as the plugin goes, it’s a plugin called WP Ajax Edit Comments. I discovered it on accident. You can find it here: http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit-comments/
Hope that helps!
DrMike: That’s the reason for the “virtually” statement. I don’t think any large site is 100% spam free. I just think that some are havens for spammers, such as Blogspot, and others are not, such as Wordpress.
As far as the plugin goes, it’s a plugin called WP Ajax Edit Comments. I discovered it on accident. You can find it here: http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit...
Hope that helps!
I think the “virtually” portion of the statement is too strong. A simple spin around the wp.com system with the Next Blog link shows a fair number of splogs, a lot more than the single digit percentage that Automattic suggests. We’ve seen splogs hit the top100 quite often as well. Plus I’ve found many splogs on wp.com that have been there for long periods of time.
Thank you for the link,
-drmike
I think the “virtually” portion of the statement is too strong. A simple spin around the wp.com system with the Next Blog link shows a fair number of splogs, a lot more than the single digit percentage that Automattic suggests. We’ve seen splogs hit the top100 quite often as well. Plus I’ve found many splogs on wp.com that have been there for long periods of time.
Thank you for the link,
-drmike
DrMike: Maybe the problem is getting worse then. This is an older article, from back in early April, so things might have changed. I did several spins on the next blog feature and found only one the whole time. Contrast that to Blogspot where most were spam.
I’ll have to follow up with WordPress on this.
DrMike: Maybe the problem is getting worse then. This is an older article, from back in early April, so things might have changed. I did several spins on the next blog feature and found only one the whole time. Contrast that to Blogspot where most were spam.
I’ll have to follow up with WordPress on this.
Yep, that’s why I moved from Blogger and some of the other services to Wordpress alone. Because they are just cleaner, and more friendly to work with… it just feels more seamless. Plus, Akismet works very well. I think their (controversial?) decision to remove Adsense was one of their biggest selling points for me. I really don’t like it when I see a blog so cluttered with a whole lot of adverts etc. Going to a Wordpress blog, and having a Wordpress blog, is just such a pleasure!
Yep, that’s why I moved from Blogger and some of the other services to Wordpress alone. Because they are just cleaner, and more friendly to work with… it just feels more seamless. Plus, Akismet works very well. I think their (controversial?) decision to remove Adsense was one of their biggest selling points for me. I really don’t like it when I see a blog so cluttered with a whole lot of adverts etc. Going to a Wordpress blog, and having a Wordpress blog, is just such a pleasure!
Jewellery: I agree wholeheartedly about WP. If I were to go back to a free blogging service, WP would be it without any doubt…
Jewellery: I agree wholeheartedly about WP. If I were to go back to a free blogging service, WP would be it without any doubt…
Test comment again as it appears that comments are being eaten when I leave a link.
Wordpress.com is not adsense free. Automattic runs it’s own adverts on the site. I’d give a link but I’m trying to get a comment to show up here.
Please kindly do a Google search for ‘Wordpress.com google adsense’ and look for an article on the pascal.vanhecke.info site. It’s currently the 6th one down on the first page of results.
Test comment again as it appears that comments are being eaten when I leave a link.
Wordpress.com is not adsense free. Automattic runs it’s own adverts on the site. I’d give a link but I’m trying to get a comment to show up here.
Please kindly do a Google search for ‘Wordpress.com google adsense’ and look for an article on the pascal.vanhecke.info site. It’s currently the 6th one down on the first page of results.
drmike: True, but the difference is that they do not allow users to run Adsense without paying some amount to the service for the right. WordPress may run their own ads, but those are to pay for the servers, no line user’s pockets.
Whether one agrees with this as a user or not is up to them, but it has greatly helped with the spam situation.
drmike: True, but the difference is that they do not allow users to run Adsense without paying some amount to the service for the right. WordPress may run their own ads, but those are to pay for the servers, no line user’s pockets.
Whether one agrees with this as a user or not is up to them, but it has greatly helped with the spam situation.
This is why I love WP more than anything else in this world. Hopefully, someday they can be affiliate-friendly. You see, as of now, they don’t accommodate affiliate links.
This is why I love WP more than anything else in this world. Hopefully, someday they can be affiliate-friendly. You see, as of now, they don’t accommodate affiliate links.
Oil Painting: I agree, that is why they are so wonderful as a free blog host. However, I think that their lack of affiliate support is one of the key reasons why they are so spam free. If they opened up their site to ads or affiliate links, they would be targeted much more and may not be able to hold off the rush.
Besides, with hosting so cheap, it makes sense that anyone looking to make money should set up a paid hosting account. Just my two cents.
Oil Painting: I agree, that is why they are so wonderful as a free blog host. However, I think that their lack of affiliate support is one of the key reasons why they are so spam free. If they opened up their site to ads or affiliate links, they would be targeted much more and may not be able to hold off the rush.
Besides, with hosting so cheap, it makes sense that anyone looking to make money should set up a paid hosting account. Just my two cents.
Is Wordpress.com going Pro Spam?…
Say hello to Poker 101. I don’t normally link to sites filled with affiliate links and the like (At least I try not to.) but I’m making a big deal about this for one very good reason.It’s still there.You see,……
Blogs from Blogspot have better rankings in SE.
Akismet is a very efficient spam filter. It works well on own-hosted Wordpress blogs too.
Akismet is a very efficient spam filter. It works well on own-hosted Wordpress blogs too.
The lowest number I've seen was about 50%. I'll update the story with clarification in a bit, but it's still pretty clear that Blogspot is pretty much overrun.
The lowest number I've seen was about 50%. I'll update the story with clarification in a bit, but it's still pretty clear that Blogspot is pretty much overrun.