Manual Form Spam Submissions
How to Slow Down and Prevent Manual Form Spam
Manual form spam is a spammer filling in the form and submitting it — like a legitimate form user.
When spamming, there is likely to be some pseudo automation, like pasting pre-written text into a text box. But it appears to be and actually is a human filling out your form and submitting it.
If your site visitors can use the form, then manually submitting spammers assume they can, too.
See further below, An Alternative to The Action Steps, for a way to prevent manual-submission spammers from using your forms, even when they know where your forms are.
How Form Spammers Get To You
Spambots rove the internet looking for forms.
The web page URLs of forms they find are stored in a database that human spammers will use.
These humans have automated software that automatically opens up a form page where they paste in their spew. Then they submit the form and their software opens up the next form to spam.
If your site visitors can use the form, then manually submitting spammers suppose they can, too.
Form Spammers can also get to you through Google. A Google search can provide the URLs. Same with other search engines.
As an illustration, do a search for "contact" and you'll get lots and lots of hits. Scroll down past the listings that sell products (forms, services, contact lenses, …). Very soon, you'll come across links to lots of contact pages.
See how easy it is for manual form spammers to find web pages with forms?
Narrow your search to "contact bicycle" (or whatever criteria might meet the spammer's intent) and you'll get contact pages for websites related to bicycles.
How to Slow Down Manual Form Spam
First of all, don't block robots and spiders from form pages through your robots.txt file. That is an invitation to rogue bots to see what it is you're hiding.
Instead, put this meta tag into the source code of form pages, in the head area:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
It won't be instant. But eventually the form pages will be removed from reputable search engine indexes.
Another thing you may decide to do, after the meta tag implementation, is to change the file names of form web pages to something that does not contain the word "contact", "message", or other words that indicate the page contains a form.
That will be instant.
Your new form page is not in the search engine indexes at all (unless you use a file name that was previously indexed). Add the meta tag at the same time and the page will stay out of reputable indexes.
There are still manual finds and spambots following links and reading the content of pages looking for form tags. Yet, if you implement the above suggestions, your manual form spam should soon start to reduce, perhaps slowly, but eventually becoming only a once-in-a-while dribble.
The Action Steps
These are actions you can take to protect your forms (see also An Alternative to The Action Steps):
-
Put the suggested
metatag into the source code of web pages with forms. This will tell legitimate search engine spiders and indexes that you don't want the page indexed. - Give the pages with forms a new file name. A never-before-used file name for a web page means it is not in search engine indexes at all.
Those two steps are likely to reduce the amount of manual form spam to a slow dribble.
An Alternative to The Action Steps
The above action steps won't be required with the free Spam‑free Form. Use Spam‑free Form to prevent both auto-submitted and manually-submitted form spam.
Sign up for Spam‑free Form now. One sign-up is good for all your domains and as many forms as you need — free.
People who have Spam‑free Forms on their websites are glad they signed up.
Will Bontrager
