Real Estate website traffic is one of the major keys in getting more business via your blogsite but when your site starts to get noticed you’ll start to get unwanted traffic too.  So-called internet experts are out there preying on unsuspecting blogsite owners to spend thousands of dollars to increase their traffic everyday.   The scams used to start like this: “GUARANTEED 1ST PAGE GOOGLE RANKING“. Those were easy red alert messages that everyone would instantly ignore because any good SEO expert would know that there is no absolute guarantee.  More increasingly the SPAM (or scams) have become more creative with cute introductory language which sounds more inviting and probabilistic than categoric.

“We are interested to increase your traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.”

“I need traffic and this sounds genuine” you would think.  But watch out, they are all the same.  How do we know this is spam ? Well the first few clues – it is unsolicited, there is no phone number, no website, and the dead giveaway – you get them 10 times a week.

Here’s another one:

How do you stop them from getting through to your inbox ?  Well , there is no one magic answer because once a solution has been implemented they just come up with new work-arounds.  The easiest thing to do is ignore them, but that is just another task you have to manage.  Here are some other suggestions:

• Use Hidden form fields
• Use CAPTCHA such as the one provided by the cForms plugin
• Additional form verification Q&A such as “Is soup hot or cold ?”
• Use REGEX for certain keywords such as “we are interested to increase traffic to your website”
• Log and block certain IP addrresses

There are of course much more involved tasks which require ongoing maintenance, but if some of the basic protection implementations are in place at least some of the form spam can be minimized.  And again, the key here is since all contact form spam may not be caught by these automated means, it is important to recognize that they are spam and not  spend thousands of dollars which show little results.