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Todd Friesen is a former blog spammer. Who knows? He may have visited your blog in the past. Hear his tales of the “old” days, why and how he did what he did… and why he no longer does it.

Todd Friesen is considered by many to be an SEO pioneer. He entered the SEO world in 1998 and has since worked with top-name clients like Sharper Image, Nike, Neiman Marcus and Accor Hotels North America on natural search optimization. He is an expert in search engine marketing, a former administrator at Webmasterworld, and former moderator for Search Engine Watch. He co-hosted the popular SEO Rockstars on WebmasterRadio.FM, as well as a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, SMX and other conferences including Shop.org. He has also a regular contributor to OMMA Magazine and regularly posts on his own blog at www.oilman.ca.

Todd is the VP of Search at Position Technologies and works with new and established companies to optimize existing sites and help architect new ones to achieve optimal natural search engine rankings. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Calgary and currently resides in Gig Harbor WA.

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A few moments ago, I received a comment notifcation for a post I made a couple of years ago (which must rank well in Google for it to be noticed today). The comment turned out to be spam for An HDTV Reminder. I get hundreds of spam comments every day. In fact, my installation of WordPress claims: “Akismet has caught 227,338 spam for you since you first installed it.” Yikes!

This one, however, definitely slipped through (emphasized in red):

Author : Diana (IP: 217.17.88.78 , clients-217-17-88-78.mikrovisata.net)
E-mail : servemail@8080mail.info
URI : www.hdtv.***************.info/
Whois : ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=217.17.88.78
Comment: Please visit my site, click my ads and buy my crap

Forget about claiming that .INFO domains are registered for nothing other than spam sites – this is probably the one of the funniest pieces of blog spam I’ve ever recieved! I almost approved it, based on the hearty guffaw it elicited.

• Todd Friesen – Confessions of a Reformed Spammer
• Gmail Spam Management Doesn’t Go Far Enough
• Akismet Lacks Essential Features
• Windows Security Software
• Spam Musubi Recipe
• Have You Ever Tasted McSpam?
• Spam Increases Along with Security Issues
• Top-Rated Firewall Back by Request
• Stop Spam from Reaching Your Computer
• Is Spam ever Going Away?

I get a lot of comment spam, and Akismet blocks most of that spam effectively. Here’s the problem: the Akismet service isn’t paginated. So, even though my Akismet WordPress plugin tells me that I currently have 2,402 potential spam messages in the queue, I can only view the first 150 (?) or so. I run into this problem even when I’m not on vacation, as I frequently receive 300+ spam comments overnight.

You can delete all of the spam from your database with a single click. This operation cannot be undone, so you may wish to check to ensure that no legitimate comments got through first. Spam is automatically deleted after 15 days, so don’t sweat it.

But I don’t want to delete ‘em all – I just want to delete what I see on the first page. I still need to review the other pieces of potential spam that Akismet isn’t showing me. It would also be helpful if I could sort comments by “spam likeliness.” Akismet is certainly the best solution out there for combating blog spam, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.

• Todd Friesen – Confessions of a Reformed Spammer
• Blog Comment Spammers
• Akismet Accidents?
• Windows Security Software
• Spam Musubi Recipe
• Have You Ever Tasted McSpam?
• Spam Increases Along with Security Issues
• Top-Rated Firewall Back by Request
• Stop Spam from Reaching Your Computer
• Is Spam ever Going Away?