WordpressLovesSpam

The Wordpress.com Like Spam Issue Automattic/Wordpress.com Refuses to Acknowledge

Automattic/Wordpress.com regarding the Like Spam Issue:

🙈🙉🙊

Obviously, Wordpress.com and Automattic Does Not Care about SPAM. The Like Spam Issue

SPAM hurts content creators since it can negatively impact search engine rankings. This because spammers use things like comments and likes to attempt to advertise their website. They are usually linking to blogs or websites that have low quality content and/or unrelated to the content covered on your site.

While WordPress provides Anti-Spam protection for comments, they do not with Wordpress.com Likes. Wordpress.com Likes allow users to like a post, which of course provides a link back to the person’s blog. Spammers are exploiting this to attempt to advertise their website and/or blog as a provides a link back to their website.

This of course causes a problem of SPAM likes as spammers takes advantage of this to advertise their content, not because they genuinely like the content. This of course can affect search engine rankings as linking to low quality sites can cause the rankings to your website to drop due to a penalty. Of course, links to these SPAM blogs also appear on your posts on WordPress.com Reader, which hurts your blog’s reputation since you are unintentionally linking back to the Spammer’s blog.

SPAM Likes are defined as people who places likes on random posts that does not follow your blog. They also have a blog that is completely unrelated to yours and most of the time have low quality content or content that is considered SPAM.

Example of a SPAM Liker:

example

The data on Like Spammers is publicly available here

If your name appears on this list, it is not removable. If you don’t want your name put on this list, do not spam like.

Of course, WordPress Isn’t Doing a Single Thing About It, Even If Spam Likes are Against Acceptable Use Policy.

Wordpress.com and Automattic has refused to do a single thing about the SPAM like issue. There are several threads regarding this issue:

I have contacted support about this issue and possibly have these SPAM likes removed, and they outright refused to do a single thing:

(Redacted) (Automattic)

May 11, 2021, 14:03 UTC

Hi there,

Likes are currently disabled within Jetpack on the https://chikorita157.com/ site. I see there are some Likes on specific posts within the WordPress.com Reader here:

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/50814868

Are those Likes in the WordPress.com Reader what you’re referring to as spam?

Anyone with a WordPress.com account is able to Like any post in the WordPress.com Reader. That is one of the features of the WordPress.com Reader, so it’s not possible to disable that.

Our system automatically stops accounts from Liking sites or posts if it detects suspicious activity. However, we are not able to block an account from Liking other sites simply because you would prefer a particular account not Like any of your posts.

Our developers do not have any plans to change how Likes function in the WordPress.com Reader at this time. However, we certainly appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration.

I hope that helps clarify things for you. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.

(Redacted)

Happiness Engineer Automattic

Of course, their terms of service says this:

Spam or machine-generated content.

You know what this is, but in general, sites such as those primarily dedicated to drive traffic to third party sites, boost SEO, phish, spoof, or promote affiliate marketing aren’t cool. We don’t want you to pollute the web outside of WordPress.com either, so we ask you to please avoid sending unwanted or unsolicited promotions or emails about your site, even if it’s not on WordPress.com.

Yes, they are being hypocritcal since Spamming Likes on random posts would be against of Acceptable Use Policy, but they won’t do a thing about it.

Why Create this Website?

I am frustrated beyond belief as there are users who demand to have the WordPress Likes enabled while there are Like Spammers, which continue to abuse the system. Why should I promote their SPAM and ill-relevant site on my content? Not only that, this makes the Like system pointless as it makes the metric useless due to fake and SPAM likes.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We are only asking Automattic to come up with a solution to resolve the issue of SPAM likes issue on WordPress. We only ask Automattic to change the Like system so Spammers can’t abuse it for their own again. After all, SPAM of all types is against the TOS, so why they don’t enforce it with the Likes system.

They can resolve this by implementing the following:

Experiencing the Same Issue?

First off, consider disabling the WordPress Like system to prevent your site from being penalized for linking to SPAM. Also, report this issue by contacting Wordpress.com Support. Mention the names of the like spammers, their blog links on Wordpress.com Reader, and the posts affected. In addition, provide the link to the feed of your blog on Wordpress.com reader and a link to this repo.

Also, you can contribute to the Like Spam data by forking this repo, adding the provided data in the CSV (SPAM Liker Name, Spam Site, Spam WordPress Reader Link, and Garavtar link), and create a pull request. Also, provide the number of times that you were spam like by the offending user. If it’s the same user, add the number to the Spam Like Count total. With enough content creators complaining about this issue, we can make Automattic aware of this issue, which they refuse to acknowledge so they can make the changes.