Spam can cause some serious problems to your website - for example, it can lower your website's rankings in the search results, reduce the trust of search engines, and even lead to your website being blocked in search engines. Therefore, to avoid these problems, you need to regularly check all the weak points of your resource, which spammers often exploit. You also need to avoid doing anything that can be considered as creating spam and attempting to unfairly raise your rating in the SERP.
What Can Be Considered Spam – Theory
Spam can be understood as various mailings, comments left on forums, blogs or websites, advertising links posted or sent without the consent of the recipient or owner of the website where they appeared. Often, these are mass actions, since it is important for spammers to attract the attention of as many people as possible at minimal cost. Search engines constantly fight it by trying to find new ways to recognize spam.
Search engines are constantly struggling with this, trying to find new ways to recognize spam posted on websites and spammers’ attempts to trick bots to get to higher positions in the search results. However, you should not rely on the work of search robots alone. Active actions taken by the web resource owner play a very important role in neutralizing spam.
How to Avoid Search Engine Spam
Search robots can easily detect such actions as:
- Too frequent repetition of a key request, usually in the same form, not adapted to the text, which appears in different parts of the page;
- Dumping – a lot of different keywords and phrases on one page;
- Weaving – using other people's sources and inserting keywords into their text;
- Mixing – compiling texts from different sources with minimal editing.
Avoid posting these kinds of content on your website and you will not run into any problems with search engines.
How to Deal with Forum Spam
Most spammers are not people but programs (spambots). They just search the web for places where they could post their messages. Modern spambots have already learned how to bypass the captcha protection. The most popular types of spam are:
- Primitive link spam, which is used by the laziest spammers. The algorithm of their actions is very simple – they register on a forum, forum visitors then begin to receive link messages, usually without any readable content.
- Question-answer type. A spammer responds to someone's real question with a message containing links and/or keywords or pictures with logos.
Ways to neutralize spam on a forum:
- Disable automatic user activation on the forum.
- Make it so that only a moderator can approve a user. If we are talking about a popular forum that has dozens of people registering on it every day, this method is not very convenient. But for small forums, it has its advantages – for example, you can immediately filter out unwanted and suspicious users.
- Block users who post spam messages. A forum needs to be moderated in any case. If you do not have enough time to do it, identify trusted people and appoint them as moderators on different sections of your forum.
How to Deal with Spam in the Comments?
Spam posted in the comments can reduce the level of search engines’ trust in the resource, so it must be promptly removed. There are also several ways, apart from pre-moderation, to prevent the appearance of inappropriate content in comments under different articles or on forums:
- Blacklisting the IP addresses from which spam messages were sent;
- Making a list of words that, when they appear in the account’s name, will not allow the system to publish the comment. For example, on a forum dedicated to cars or computer technology, users often register with names that contain the word "repair" and other similar words, and then try to offer their services by commenting on various topics;
- A strategy of having words that don't allow certain comments to be posted. It may be applied to message text as well as link text. It is necessary to blacklist words related to undesirable topics (for example, various casinos and betting websites are aggressively advertised, so words and phrases associated with them can be blacklisted).
Manual moderation is indispensable in any case. But setting up blacklists can help you save time.
How to Deal with Spam – Drupal Practice
The platform developers have created some modules that defend their users from malware distributors.
1. Antibot
The main advantage of this module is the lack of CAPTCHA codes. This is the simplest and the most lightweight module that will properly work when JavaScript is enabled. The Antibot module works great on any device, including cell phones.
2. CAPTCHA
It is best to use this module for a user’s registration page. CAPTCHA works on a question-and-answer basis and instantly identifies all spambots. As a result, you will get excellent protection for your client's web page.
3. Honeypot
The cool thing about this popular module is that it adds invisible secure fields that users can't see. These are not captchas and false fields that the spam programs are attracted to. The honeypot deprives spammers of this pleasure.
4. Spamicide
It is a powerful protection system against spam of any origin. The Spamicide module adds invisible fields to various input forms and if a spam bot tries to fill them in, it will fail.
5. Protected Submissions
This is a simple and very convenient module that successfully monitors all content entering the website - comments, web forms and contact forms. You can control everything, down to unwanted language characters and preset templates.
Add Spam Protection to Your Drupal Website
To ensure the safety of your website, our team is always ready to provide any assistance – from a free consultation to the installation of any Drupal modules.