I’ve seen it, I’ve had it, and I’m sick of it. Sploggers (spam-bloggers), they’re everywhere. Whether they’re building their splogs (spam-blogs) or giving you a ton of comment spam, everyone truly hates them. So the big question is: how do we get rid of sploggers?

We go back to basics. Content.

Now, you might ask, how do sploggers come up with content? Surely one must have some decent content to get a decent audience. Guess where they get it from? They grab it from us bloggers. Yes, those sly foxes will grab our RSS feeds and simply repost that content. Not only is it unethical to take someone’s work without crediting them, it’s also illegal under copyright law.

Thankfully, you can protect yourself against feed-stealers. If you’re using Wordpress, Angusman’s Feed Copyrighter will add a copyright message at the end of the feed. Just do a simple Google search for your copyright message to see if your feed has been stolen. If it has been copied, you should tell the webmaster to remove it. Failing which, you should directly contact the website’s registrar and/or hosting provider.

Another way to reduce comment spam is to ensure you have the “nofollow” relation embedded into your comment links. It should look like this: <a href=”http://splog” rel=”nofollow”>Splogger</a>. Wordpress 1.5 and newer provides this functionality, but it still pays to check that it’s there. Most search engines will ignore “nofollow” links.

C’mon people, let’s clean up the web.