Massive WordPress.com Spam

UPDATE
I received an email from Donncha on the WordPress.com team. They responded extremely quickly to the problem (turns out there was more than just that one blog).

The email read:

“We took care of the problem and we do have anti-spam measures in place.
Currently, the best place to report spam sites is through the feedback
form in your wp-admin backend. About 6 other people did so and since
feedback mails are always monitored it was quickly dealt with.

Thanks for being proactive, please report other spam blogs as you find them!”

Mad props to WordPress.com.

Original Post

Well this is certainly interesting. Upon logging into my WordPress.com account, I was greeted by quite a mess. The Dashboard on WordPress.com shows us the most popular and most recent posts from around the wordpress-dot-com-oh-sphere. The most recent section was (and still is) filled with posts by one iWilliam102.

You can see a screenshot here.

All of the links on all of the posts point to tires.321-info.com (but don’t go there, as Donncha on the wordpress.com team points out, why help his page rank?).

WordPress.com really needs to work to make sure it does not become the BlogSpot (or as some say, SplogSpot) of the new web. It’s an amazing service and hopefully will stay that way when they figure out this problem.

Hopefully the WordPress.com team can sort this out and figure out a way to prevent it from happening in the future, considering this post:

WordPress.com FAQ – Adsense and other Ads
“We currently don’t allow Adsense or other JS ad code on the site, though we probably will in the future. However right now it is keeping sploggers (spam bloggers) from exploiting WP.com and only a few legit users have asked for it.

We’ll announce when you’ll be able to add Adsense or Yahoo or Chitika to your templates.

We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for search engine optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WP.com is not for you.”

One of the comments made to that post is as follows: “How about some flagging or reporting system for wordpress.com blogs which are found to be created for just seo or false clicking??”

I would suggest that it be taken a step further and made so any blog that is subject to a large number of reports by other wordpress.com members is automatically disabled temporarily while the owner is notified. It’s a shoot first, ask questions later attitude, but in the world of online marketing and spam, it’s just about all we have got.

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