Comments and Spam

Comments and Spam

Building a community on your blog is a great idea. If you have regular readers on your blog then the chances are they will link to your site meaning more search traffic. One way to encourage a community on your site is by leaving your comments section open. This means that readers on your site can comment on the articles you write and leave positive or negative feedback.
Unfortunately one problem with this is of course the dreaded spam. Just like you get spam messages sent to your email inbox, unscrupulous people make a lot of money by sending spam to millions of blog s in the hope that it won’t get noticed.
So how do you stop spammers linking to your page? If you are using WordPress then the software already has built in tools to tackle the problem but there are also other things you can do.
The most efficient defence against unwanted spam is reviewing your comments regularly and removing any spam or unwanted comments. When doing this you need to look out for stealth spam. This is a technique where the spammer will leave a plausible comment but their URL or name will be the spam link. As a general rule, if any comment looks completely unrelated to your posts, it is probably spam so should be removed.
The next thing to be aware of is that current versions of WordPress come with the spam fighter Akismet already installed. This is a great piece of software that ‘learns’ which comments are spam and which are not. If Akismet is not already turned on you can go to the plugins panel to activate it. If you still get spam comments with this turned on, do not be tempted to delete the spam comment, mark the comment as spam and it will be added to the Akismet community database. This will mean the software will get stronger hopefully leading to less spam.
David Smith
Writer/Editor

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