Jason Morrison from Search Quality Team at Google posted at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog about how to control comment spam:

“So, you've set up a forum on your site for the first time, or enabled comments on your blog. You carefully craft a post or two, click the submit button, and wait with bated breath for comments to come in.
And they do come in. Perhaps you get a friendly note from a fellow blogger, a pressing update from an MMORPG guild member, or a reminder from your Aunt Millie about dinner on Thursday.But then you get something else.Something… disturbing. Offers for deals that are too good to be true, bizarre logorrhean gibberish, and explicit images you certainly don't want Aunt Millie to see.You are now buried in a deluge of dreaded comment spam.

Comment spam is bad stuff all around.It's bad for you, because it adds to your workload. It's bad for your users, who want to find information on your site and certainly aren't interested in dodgy links and unrelated content.It's bad for the web as a whole, since it discourages people from opening up their sites for user-contributed content and joining conversations on existing forums.

So what can you, as a webmaster, do about it?

A quick disclaimer: the list below is a good start, but not exhaustive. There are so many different blog, forum, and bulletin board systems out there that we can't possibly provide detailed instructions for each, so the points below are general enough to make sense on most systems.

Make sure your commenters are real people

• Add a CAPTCHA.

  CAPTCHAs require users to read a bit of obfuscated text and type it back in to prove they're a human being and not an automated script. If your blog or forum system doesn't have CAPTCHAs built in you may be able to find a plugin like Recaptcha, a project which also helps digitize old books.CAPTCHAs are not foolproof but they make life a little more difficult for spammers. You can read more about the many different types of CAPTCHAS, but keep in mind that just adding a simple one can be fairly effective.

• Block suspicious behavior. Many forums allow you to set time limits between posts, and you can often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and other activity more common to bots than human beings.

Use automatic filtering systems

• Block obviously inappropriate comments by adding words to a blacklist. Spammers obfuscate words in their comments so this isn't a very scalable solution, but it can keep blatant spam at bay.
• Use built-in features or plugins that delete or mark comments as spam for you. Spammers use automated methods to besmirch your site, so why not use an automated system to defend yourself? Comprehensive systems like Akismet, which has plugins for many blogs and forum systems and TypePad AntiSpam, which is open-source and compatible with Akismet, are easy to install and do most of the work for you.
• Try using Bayesian filtering options, if available. Training the system to recognize spam may require some effort on your part, but this technique has been used successfully to fight email spam.

Make your settings a bit stricter

• Nofollow untrusted links. Many systems have a setting to add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the links in comments, or do so by default. This may discourage some types of spam, but it's definitely not the only measure you should take.
• Consider requiring users to create accounts before they can post a comment. This adds steps to the user experience and may discourage some casual visitors from posting comments, but may keep the signal-to-noise ratio higher as well.
• Change your settings so that comments need to be approved before they show up on your site. This is a great tactic if you want to hold comments to a high standard, don't expect a lot of comments, or have a small, personal site. You may be able to allow employees or trusted users to approve posts themselves, spreading the workload.
• Think about disabling some types of comments. For example, you may want to disable comments on very old posts that are unlikely to get legitimate comments. On blogs you can often disable trackbacks and pingbacks, which are very cool features but can be major avenues for automated spam.

Keep your site up-to-date

• Take the time to keep your software up-to-date and pay special attention to important security updates. Some spammers take advantage of security holes in older versions of blogs, bulletin boards, and other content management systems. Check the Quick Security Checklist for additional measures.

You may need to strike a balance on which tactics you choose to implement depending on your blog or bulletin board software, your user base, and your level of experience. Opening up a site for comments without any protection is a big risk, whether you have a small personal blog or a huge site with thousands of users. Also, if your forum has been completely filled with thousands of spam posts and doesn't even show up in Google searches, you may want to submit a reconsideration request after you clear out the bad content and take measures to prevent further spam.

As a long-time blogger and web developer myself, I can tell you that a little time spent setting up measures like these up front can save you a ton of time and effort later. I'm new to the Webmaster Central team, originally from Cleveland. I'm very excited to help fellow webmasters, and have a passion for usability and search quality (I've even done a bit of academic research on the topic). Please share your tips on preventing comment and forum spam in the comments below, and as always you're welcome to ask questions in our discussion group.”

Really interesting!

Here are my 2 cents:

Option1: Most blogs are geared up with certain options that allow the users to restrict as to who can comment on articles and who can not. You can also shut down comments completely, or you even have a choice of disabling the comments on old posts.

Option 2: Make sure that the users who comment, are real people with a captcha.

Option 3: Make use of an automatic filtering system. I have three options for you: Akismet, Akismet, Akismet!

Option 4: Have some fields required. Make sure that you are requiring Name and Email for posting comments on the forums.

Option 5: Install Spam Karma – This would surely help you in stoping a flood of spam comments. The best thing is that It Is Free!

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Keeping Comment Spam off Your Website and Away from Users!

Mozilla Firefox is releasing the Firefox 3 Release Candidate today and has declared it the 'Download Day 2008', in an effort to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a day.

Some of the interesting features of Mozilla Firefox 3 are:

1. One-Click Bookmarking.
2. A Smart Location Bar.
3. Lightning Fast Performance.
4. Built-In Spell Checking.
5. Restore Session.
6. Full Zoom.

Firefox 3 will offer more than 5000 add-on applications, including Shareaholic, that allows you to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages via web 2.0 social networking websites.

Firefox 3 is scheduled to be released at 10 am PDT. You can always help one of the most preferred web browsers to achieve their goal of a Guinness World Record by downloading Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate from here.

Hurry! Download your copy of Firefox 3 now and assist Mozilla in achieving their dream!

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Firefox Looking to Set a Guinness World Record! Download Day 2008! Download Firefox 3 Today!

Yesterday a whole lot of bloggers everywhere were shocked and shaken when they saw their Feedburner's Subscriber Count abruptly plummet to about 50% from the previous day. We were no exception and were left shell-shocked when we saw the figures drop down by as much as half, we had over 1000 subscribers the day before and dropped down to 678 yesterday as you know. And we went about figuring out what went wrong. It was only after we checked out the subscribers of the other blogs that that we keep a tab on, taking a hit, we knew we were not alone.

Marketing Pilgrims count went down by 50 percent, "It's always a sad day for me when one of the first things I see on the Internet is that my personal blog subscriber count has taken a major hit—and today my numbers were down more than 50% off yesterday" Says Jordan.

The HubSpot blog had close to 2,400 RSS subscribers yesterday and their statistics now stand at about 1,529. Similar was the case with OnStartups.com, it had about 8,400 subscribers but in just a matter of a day it left with a mere 5,196 subscribers, observes Hubspot.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that feedburner has left so many astonished with the subscriber counts. This one is similar to the one that was experienced in November last year. Apparently, there doesn't seem to be much discussion about it, although there reports about it a bloggeries.

Whatever the problem was back then, the glitch recurred a couple of days later, and took somewhat longer to restore some feeds than others. In case the problems is similar to last time it can be expected to normalize withing a day or two.

While the FeedBurner now lets you see the time statistics yet again, the unprecedented dips (like the ones being experienced now) will stay put in your time stats report, like an ugly scar.

Furthermore, whenever this sort of a glitch occurs it really surprises you and hits you hard. Let's Hope Feedburner Statistics are normalized soon and that we don't get to see another episode of this. So there's nothing to blame yourself anymore if you did after you saw your subscribers dip . If you also took the hit, leave a comment on this article indicating what your subscriber count was yesterday, and what it is today.

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Feedburner's Subscriber Count Goes Awry!

Ever resourceful Ionut Alex Chitu has a post that helps you find the number of Google subscribers to any feed.

"Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active."

In response to this, the official Google Reader blog has a post that 'clarifies' the confusion.

"We've made changes (some as recently as today) as to how counts are being calculated. This is probably going to be pretty boring unless you're a feed publisher, but we thought it would be best to explain things a bit. Here are the various numbers you may come across, and what they all mean:

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. You can see them in Reader's feed search results (pictured below) and the Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, our crawler reports them to the publisher each time we fetch the feed. Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

FeedBurner numbers: If you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL. So if http://www.example.com/atom.xml has 3 subscribers, http://www.example.com/rss.xml has 7 subscribers and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example (where you redirect the other two feeds now) has 12 subscribers, then you will see 3 + 7 + 12 = 22 subscribers reported in the FeedBurner interface.

What this all means if you're a feed publisher is that if you're interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you're a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to."

Thats not all, other experts have lent their own pointers and tips to this:

Gabe Rivera's list of top feeds and popular 2.0 blogs and their Google Reader numbers on TechCrunch

Lee Odden Top SEO Blogs according to Google Reader (we’re #8)

Matt Cutts adds tips on Google Reader tracking.

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Know The Number Of Subscribers To Your Feed In Google Reader

Yahoo! China has launched a blogging and networking service, informs Yahoo! News. This move is targeted at broadening its revenue 'as it steps up expansion in the world's second-largest Web market by subscriber numbers.'
The Yahoo! Space service comprises of blogging, photo gallery, online networking and other interactive features for Yahoo! users.

"Search is a tool for the user to get the information he wants, but it is not the final destination. Yahoo's next step will be to allow users to share their hobbies with each other so that they can expand their knowledge," Zeng Ming, Yahoo China's new president said in the emailed statement.

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Yahoo! China Enters Blogging And Networking World

Directory submissions are a popular way of promoting blogs and RSS feeds. However, the list of directories is quite extensive and differentiated to say the least. There are blog specific directories as well as RSS specific ones.
   
Lee Odden has compiled a list of 97 blog directories that one can submit to. Though as Lee himself says, the list is not a new ones, there are enough resources to jumpstart any blog promotion. 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

97 Blog Directories to Jumpstart Blog Promotion

Vanessa Fox on official Google blog talks about the power of community in blogging. Linking to those sites that are most relevant from the readers point of view and commenting on relevant blogs helps in increasing the relevancy of the blog. Content as always is the most significant thing of all. Good content and other bloggers will link to it.

About search engine indexing the blog Vanessa says, “if you have a blog for your business, you could provide a link from your main site to the latest blog post. You can also let search engines know about the pages of your site by submitting a Sitemap file. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all support the Sitemaps protocol and if you have a blog, it couldn't be easier! Simply submit your blog's RSS feed. Each time you update your blog and your RSS feed is updated, the search engines can extract the URL of the latest post. This ensures search engines know about the updates right away.”

Though the information stresses a lot on links and content being of importance, however, it actually helps in reviving their importance.

For a better insight read the complete post.

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Google On Building The Blog Audience

All those who have a WordPress blog should go through the Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress by Jim Westergren. This is an excellent piece of work by Jim. A good number of bloggers out there have very less knowledge about SEO. However, with this simple and easy to understand guide they stand a good chance of acquiring a good rank with the search engines.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Guide For WordPress Bloggers

Google Operating System informs that Google Blog search ranks the search results by relevancy. The sort by date is also available. However, it is interesting to note the way Google ranks blog posts. 

Positive signals

• links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")
• links from other sources (mail, chats)
• using tags to categorize a post
• PageRank
• the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)
• clicks in search results

Negative signals (spam signals)

• posts added at a predictable time
• different content between the site and the feed
• the amount of duplicate content
• using words/n-grams that appear frequently in spam blogs
• posts that have identical size
• linking to a single web page
• a large number of ads
• the location of ads ("the presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog")

For a better insight read the full post.

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Now Rank Better In Google Blog Search

Keeping in view that the German speaking webmasters community is the second largest community, Google has introduced Google Webmasters blog in German language.

Official Google Webmasters Central blog states:
For those German-speaking folks among our readers of this English Webmaster Central Blog we have exciting news: We have just launched the German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog! This is a tribute to the fact that the German-speaking webmaster community is our second biggest audience of this blog. The German Webmaster Blog will provide you with first-hand information tailored towards our German-speaking webmasters. The blog will contain a mix of German versions of postings from this blog as well as unique postings about market-specific issues.

Check out the German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog!

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Google Webmaster Central Blog In German language

Shoemoney has been banned from MyBlogLog. This is no hearsay. Shoemoney has confirmed the news himself.

I have been banned from MyBlogLog… Since last night every page I visit on their site results in a 403 (Forbidden) error code. I have asked others and nobody else seems to get the error but me.

A little while later, he posted an update saying:

Well, as confirmed in comments below I have officially been banned and will be refunded.

The 'comments below' were made by MyBlogLoggers Scott Rafer and Eric Marcoullier. The latter explained why Shoemoney was banned. The reasonning is as follows:

To be clear — we did not ban shoemoney for posting about exploits. Although we would certainly have appreciated that he email us first, it’s his decision where he would like to publish them. We banned him for publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them. On what planet is that not a bannable offense?

Shoe has, however, claimed that all he did was point out the bugs in the system. Andy Beal has declared that he will boycott MyBlogLog for banning Shoe.

In the next few minutes, I’ll be removing links to MyBlogLog and taking the JavaScript off the site. Why? Yahoo and MBL have decided to ban Jeremy Schoemoney from the service for exposing some security flaws in the product.

In support of Jeremy, I’m boycotting MBL until they reinstate his profile. What MBL doesn’t understand is that “community” means more than just a collection of avatars, it means supporting those bloggers who support you.

Andy has accused Yahoo! of "screwing up a good thing."

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MyBlogLog Bans Shoemoney, Suffers Boycott

Aaron Wall has a good post about pulling out blogs from Google Supplemental Index. The methods listed include:

• Relevant and deep links
• Make longer posts and turn comments on
• Remove/downplay sitewide repetitive features
• Optimize your internal linking structure     

 As per commercial sites, Aaron says that you need to do all the above and in addition you should:

•     add an editorial element to your site to improve your sitewide authority score
•     enable customer feedback and reviews to get more unique content on your pages

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

How To Get Your Blog Out Of Supplemental Index

Chris Garret, the CEO of Performancing after Nick Wilson resigned recently, has announced the closure of Performancing Partners. He announced the closure by saying:

I'm sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn't going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn't going to happen at all.

One of the comments to the post is by Nick himself. He commented that:

That's a dreadful waste. For want of a few grand…

A few weeks back, there were some options lying around. Not easy ones, but ones that would have allowed partners to continue, can those not be re-explored rather than see this happen?

Now his "few grand" solution has drew flak from other commenters. But Nick has never been the cold shouldered guy for Performancing or Chris. In his farewell post he had said:

The decision came about as we were planning our strategy for 2007. I came to the realization that I'm simply not the best person to lead Performancing in 2007. Furthermore, the best person to do this was already with us.

We went through a few of Chris' plans for the firm this morning, and I wasn't disappointed – what Chris has in mind just confirms my conviction that he's the right man for the job.

However, the news came as a shock to almost everyone. Performancing was making news and I though it was making money too.

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Performancing Goes Down: Many Disappointed

Seems like a dangerous hacker is on the prowl. Some SEO blogs have been hacked including Graywolf's SEO Blog and Stuntdubl. The hacker has an account  at WordPress which has been closed now.
The hacker also writes

My name is XXX. I am XXX years old, I live in XXX and I’m what some people might call a “computer geek”.

I’m going to crack all the SEO related sites/blogs/forums that I can… Maybe once in a while a non-SEO site will slip into the list but what the hell! Who cares anyways?

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Blogs Being Hacked

Blogs offer a number of useful functions such as trackbacks, comments, and RSS. Thus blog optimization becomes a useful part of search marketing. Blog software can help in improving the rankings of a site as it can manage particular type of content like post FAQ, give product updates and provide an online media room.
 
There are category features in blog software which can lead to assemblage of content according to themes. Thus making it simpler to algorithmically categorize content. Your site can get good ranks for those topics if the search engines can easily understand your content. Search engine spiders can easily find and crawl blog content as most blog softwares give simple URL structure. In short blogs can bring more traffic and can be a helpful site optimization tool.

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Blogs Make SEM Easy & How!

Guy Kawasaki has completed his debut year in blogging. He reviewed his blog 'How to Change the World.'  He reached at the conclusion that blogging is not a  money-spinning business. He also says that blogging is not a boosting factor for web 2.0 applications.

Commenting on Kawasaki's blog review, Nik Cubrilovic concluded that, "The more realistic conclusions here is that AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads – all this results in a very low CPM rate. There is no reason why a top blog for a certain niche with a defined and targetted audience can not achieve CPM rates of $5 to $10 and more. There are many advertisers out there who are trying to reach this audience, as can be seen from the explosion in sponsorship ad spots such as on Techcrunch."

Now, there are bloggers who are making money. Given that there are millions of blogs, it is only to be expected that not all of them would have quality content which goes a long way in affecting the CPM rates. If you are a blogger with an opinion, share your experience with us. How much money do you think is there in blogging? How much have you made?

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Is there No Money In Blogging?

Matt Cutts has expressed some of his favorite blogs. Matt Cutts used Google Reader to subscribe the blogs. According to Google Reader Trends Page, Search Engine Land is his most favored blog. His other top four blogs are Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal and Google Blogscoped.

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Matt Cutts' Favorite Blogs

Performancing.com has terminated the deal with PayPerPost firm, which pays bloggers for writing promotional topics on advertisers’ products and services. The deal was being talked about juat a week before. As per the deal, PayPerPost would have acquired Performancing to get services of some 28,000 Performancing workers.

Performancing.com's official blog says, “After much discussion, we've decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It's regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us."

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Performancing Terminates Deal With PayPerPost

Nielsen BuzzMetrics has released a list of top 100 blog posts of the year 2006. The word-of-mouth-measurement firm has made inbound-links analysis of different blog posts between January 1 to November 30, 2006 to prepare the list.

Based on the inbound links from other blogs during this period, a Mother Livejournal post, ' 2006 Petition Against Changes in the Livejournal Interface' was rated top most blog of the year. The story got nearly 801 links in 786 posts.

Crooks and Liars' post on 'Colbert Does the White House Correspondents' dinner' is the second most linked post in the list. It has been linked by 622 posts.

Crooks and Liars' another post ' Keith Olbermann commentary on Rumsfeld' is in the third position with 603 links.

Jonathan Carson, CEO at Nielsen BuzzMetrics viewed, “A minority of highly influential blogs continues to influence the broader conversation on the web. However, unique circumstances and events, such as the LiveJournal protest against proposed interface changes, can resonate with passionate stakeholders and catapult lesser-known blogs to the top”.

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BuzzMetrics Names Top 100 Blog Posts Of 2006