I saw an interesting post on Jay Allen’s comment spam weblog yesterday concerning what happens if you don’t take an active role in monitoring your weblog for spam.  It turns out that leaving spam on your site attracts more spam.  I hadn’t really given it much thought before, since I tend to be very quick to remove spam.  To me it’s a lot like online graffiti or vandalism.  I consider it a defacement to my site.

Anyhow, on further reflection, it makes sense.  The purpose of comment and trackback spam is to get the Googlebot to find it and index the links, thereby driving up the referrer count for the spamvertised site.  If you leave the crap in your weblog long enough for it to get indexed by Google, it shows the spammer that they were successful and they’ll come back to your site to leave more spam. 

An informal experiment run by one blogger showed that two spams left in one of her articles attracted 365 new spams within 24 hours.

Since I’ve been unable to reach Bitter by email, I’m despamming The Bitch Girls myself.  I’m doing it in batches, and so far I’ve removed 575 trackback spams.  I don’t know how many more there are to do, but it’s a time-consuming process, since the blacklist code rebuilds each entry as it goes.  After years of using MT, I have come to loathe rebuilds (in fact, rebuilds are the main reason I moved to EE).

Still, in the end it will be worth it to make the site less attractive to spammers, which should hopefully cut down the resources (CPU and bandwidth) being wasted by these scumsuckers.

Update:It looks like every trackback since 1/26/2005 was spam, for a total of 1030 bad trackbacks that I deleted.  There was also one comment in the last 500 that I removed (some sort of credit card spam).