Blogs, UCC and the infamous Powered by.
This is a report of some of my recent findings in a bit of an experiment run through the Asylum ET web site’s blog. We have tried many different things to manage Unsolicited Commercial Comment traffic into our website. We choose to not allow the messages this traffic brings to display to our users. Often we find that the measures we have taken have failed, someone found a way around so we need to make counter measures.
This can cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars for a web site due to downtime from the unsolicited traffic, adding captchas that are typically an audio clip or an image that require a human to enter text for what was heard or seen. This is a great method at the moment because computers cannot easily understand and decipher what the text mixed with lines scratched through it could possibly say or what was in the audio recording.
Technology moves on though at a rapid pace so this too has its limitations. Being a programmer myself I know of some of these limitations but I am not going to get into that publicly for obvious reasons. I will say though that this is the type of knowledge you acquire from years of experience and belonging to and actively contributing to software communities help networks, support groups or any other related organizations.
One method of managing the UCC that cannot go without being commented on is joining a community that has libraries of message types and other key identifiers of this type of traffic. We use Akismet, which works for us very well in catching the inbound traffic. They have caught some things that I cannot even fathom why someone would want to post to our website or think that it would be allowed for that matter. Obviously we are dealing with a machine here ultimately that is sending mass amounts of UCC’s to websites but they get the web addresses of the blogs to attack from somewhere right?
That leads me to the infamous provided by links. Being a developer myself I add the provided by link to my projects and creations. Some choose to leave the links in place and others remove them. Most of my projects are licensed as GPL or LGPL so although for some of them it is a requirement that the coding can not be altered in any way the majority of it is fine to go ahead and remove a link back or anything like that because you are free to use, modify and distribute the code with some limitations described in the appropriate license agreement that came in with the project.
So now about this link back. Well we have added a provided by type of link back for the aforementioned and what we have found now is that the amount of inbound UCC traffic has increased so now you remember back when I mentioned that the addresses must come from somewhere right? Well how about that 
Well we have an idea now we are going to toy with. We will remove the link back from the main site and the only link back will be in this article with a nofollow attribute in hopes that the search engines honor that and do not index the link, which should eliminate doing any query on the address of our protector to get information about our site. The only thing at this point that could/should bring any results related to the aforementioned provider would be if we were to use their name again which as you see we have taken care not to and will never again mention even though we love them.
One final note is the use in any way of the word Simon, Pam, Adam, Nathan attracts unwanted things as well so you should refrain from use of this word. It is such a nasty word anyway 