I have put up several new blogs recently and have been spending more time clearing the comment spam from the queues. This blog is still the champion but several others are peddling hard.

I have also been paying a bit of attention to my server logs since implementing a new program on some of these blogs. There is some debate in my mind if that program is working, but I have not yet given it a fair trial. I think that the strategy will work in the long run if I keep with it, but I have some question about the short run stats. All of that is for another post, possibly on another blog.

What I have noticed by checking the server logs is that most of my comments do not come from site visitors. It became apparent that the bulk of the comments were posted directly to the comment page without the poster coming in through the front door. I first thought that there must be a list somewhere of the urls deep-linking to comment pages, and, more or less, that must be the case, but the list is contained in auto-spamming software packages or harvested by automated url harvesters.

Having seen hints in places around the web and coming to the realization that this auto-comment spamming was going on I spent a bit of time today with my friend Mr. Google. With his help I found several options ranging from free (with email opt-in) to around fifty dollars. There was one forum thread that ran to 34 pages before it was locked.

There may be a place for this software, but most users don’t take the time to target the result properly. The comments placed by these softwares will only be on topic by the sheerest of luck. With the example that I saw you fill out a copy of the WordPress standard comment form and turn the software loose. The software posts the same post to all of the urls on the list. The software does not care or know if the comment is relevant.

I have seen, and see on a daily basis, the same post on multiple blogs. I first thought that people were just pasting the posts in but to do that they would have to enter the blog through the front door, find the post, go to the comment page for the post, and fill in the comment form. The server logs would show that they entered the site through a landing page and then proceeded to the comment page. Checking for the existence of this class of software cleared the mystery. The people that will use this software are unlikely to put the time in to find blogs on their subject and to produce comments that, while being general in nature, are at least on topic for the selected blogs. I recently read an article on traffic building in which the author stated that the process of blog commenting could not really be successfully automated. I agree with his opinion.

Are you plagued by auto-comment spam on your blogs? You could enter this conversation with a real comment.

I have the WordPress plug-in WP-Article-Fetch working on a couple of blogs. I had mentioned it in an earlier post and I am seeing some interest from search traffic so I think that it is time to detail my experience with the plug-in a bit more.

I reread my earlier post and will add a few further observations to what I had said. Here is the portion of the earlier post that applies:

The second plug that I have just discovered is an auto-blogging software. I put one instance of the plug-in up last evening and was able (by jumping through several hoops) to get it working. I have only looked at a couple of the articles produced so far. One had very little text to the post and that appeared to be somebodies affiliate text link with the link stripped out. The other article at which I looked had a little more content. The formatting on the articles was not too good, but I may be able to tweak that in the css file. The software pulls images, but does not produce a margin around the image so the text runs right up to the image.

The plug-in, WP-Article-Fetch, serves the articles from a server maintained by the developers of the plug. They admit that the articles are scrapped from the web. They have an article spin software on the server. The one article with content was not very human readable. I suspect that this is a shortcoming of their spin engine, but there is a lot of content that is written by non native English speakers that does not read so well either. If it is the spin engine one would have to rewrite the articles if you want a site to be proud of, but there would be some possible value if the main objective is just to attract traffic to expose to your ads. In fact people may click on an ad just to get out of there and go somewhere that makes sense.

It would be hard to recommend this plug-in to anyone. Several of the articles have been incomplete, as I mentioned in the first paragraph of my earlier post. A few of the articles provide readable content, but many are either poorly written or lost something in the translation.

There are photos included with some of the articles. The developer recommends that you host the images locally and there is a check-box to instruct the plug to do that. I did check the check-box, but no image has ever been downloaded as far as I could tell. The images are pulled from where ever they have been found on the web. If someone removes an image, or changes its location, or prevents deep linking on their site there will be a missing image in the post. Unless images are pulled from a site that specifically permits this practice it is most highly impolite to pull images from someone’s hosting space.

There may or may not be an author’s resource box with the articles. When there have been resource boxes the links have generally not been clickable. There have never been any keywords included with any article. Often the keywords that come with articles are not the best, but if an article is optimized for a keyword it is nice to have the keyword for the blog tag.

The plug-in is designed to space the posts over a period of time. Several of the posts that have been scheduled have missed the schedule. When that happens you have to manually do the post. If you want tags and categories for your posts you will also have to add them manually.

As I have found with other options, the plug-in pulled a bunch of articles initially and then the volume dropped off. There are still occasional articles inserted in the blogs by the software, but they are infrequent. The other problem with the free auto-content software that I have investigated is the filtering. Some of the articles will fit the theme of the site and some will be way off base. With any of the software that I have used there is a good deal of management required to make the software of value.

Undoubtedly original content is the best choice for your site. If you are building a site with acquired free content that content must be tightly targeted to your site theme. I am pursuing the later course with a few blogs but there is not enough history at this point to draw conclusions. The conclusions will be fodder for a future article.