Yesterday i blogged about my trouble with pligg and iwantideas.com and did a bit of detective work to find out why the site was being bombarded with so much spam…
The first thing i noticed was that the site had been submitted to a lot of ‘value my site’, ‘traffic estimator’ type sites. Typically, that’s done by owners of sites or SEO’s to establish the strength & reach of a site and get some traffic info / SEO. It was also cropping up on a lot of ‘SEO lists’;
- http://blog.seoland.co.uk/a-huge-list500-pliggbookmarking-based-on-digg-submission-sites/
- http://hubpages.com/hub/Massive-social-bookmark-list-for-seo-and-backlinks
- http://www.thaiseoboard.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=102146.0
- http://seo-link-building-strategy.blogspot.com/
- http://sites.google.com/site/seoconcept24/profile-and-pligg-do-follow
- http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1783887&page=1
That’s just the tip of the iceberg 
Obviously, that’s not good. These lists are gold to Black Hat SEO’s who try to gain links through comments, links etc… i’m aware of automated tools, i know pligg has always been targetted by black hat SEOs in years gone by, and it seems that’s still the case today. It just got out of hand for me around about the time my site was mentioned on those lists (a few months ago). Obviously those lists have gotten in to the wrong hands…
Anyway, rather than go down with the sinking ship that was pligg, i decided it wasn’t worthwhile investigating fixes and trying to lock it down. It would make more sense if i switched the platform to wordpress. That’s what i’m used to working with and it’s also easier to work with and manage, particularly when it comes to spam.
Last year, i built dk.itisdown to experiment with some pligg like functionality which i had in mind for another site, but that gave me the confidence in wordpress to adopt it for iwantideas.com.
So the logo has been touched up, there’s a new theme design (thanks to woothemes), the site has been cleared of all spam, i’ve added social features and it’s time to turn over a new leaf. Just looking at the site now, it’s a million times better looking than it was at this time yesterday.
It’s still not perfect, for example i need to emphasise the ‘submit an idea’ feature more and build more of a community with it, but i’m happy with what i’ve done over the last 24 hours. I’ve essentially nuked the site completely, built it up from scratch and manually imported the important bits from the last site. All done overnight. It’s not finished, but it’s now what i’d call ‘portfolio worthy’. I can show it off without cringing.
This time around, i’m in full control and i’ll be manually reviewing all ideas before they get near a publicly viewable page. Quality is important and i’ll be trying to keep the quality of ideas fairly high. The new design helps with that. Even though the content hasn’t changed, the ideas appear to be of a higher quality because they’re presented better 
