How to Spot and Stop Spam Comments on Your Blog
Getting comments to your blog posts can be a great confidence builder and validate your efforts if you maintain your blog for personal reasons. If your blog is a significant part of your business or your promotional strategy, then making sure you’re getting enough comments to your posts is often an essential element of your success.
There are a number of different ways to increase traffic to your website and increase the likelihood of getting people to make comments to your posts. But not all of these techniques are equally valid, of course.
Some unscrupulous business owners have decided that the best way to drive traffic to their websites is by spamming other blogs with thinly-veiled advertisements for their own products and services. The hope is that people will take notice of their comment, and that some percentage of those people will click the link back to the spammer’s website. But if these spammy comments show up on your blog, they reflect badly on you.
How Do You Spot Spam Comments on Your Blog?
Sometimes the spamming nature of the comment is apparent on its face. These spammers often don’t make any pretense of having read the post, and their comments are sometimes generic or vague. Often a spam comment will read something like “Great post! Check on my blog here: [link]” or “Thanks for providing this information, it was very useful. I’ve written something you might find interesting: [link].” Spam comments will sometimes also shamelessly list products for sale, and sometimes even prices, and then give a link to the spammer’s website.
Deleting and Filtering Spam Comments
These types of spam comments are relatively easy to spot, and you can quickly delete them from your post after logging into the administrative section of your blogging software. In addition, if you use WordPress or other leading blogging platforms, you can take advantage of any number of automatic spam recognition and blocking plug-ins that you have available.
But if you use some other blogging software, or if you find that your filters aren’t able to catch every single spam comment (which will almost certainly be the case at some point), then you’ll end up having to delete them by hand. Make sure you check your comments list as frequently as you can in order to reduce the amount of time that any spam comment is visible to your visitors.
Site Registration Requirements Can Reduce Spam
Another option for reducing spam on your website is to require that any website visitor register with your site in order to comment right away, and those who don’t register will have their comments held (but not published) until you approve it.
This might also give many visitors an incentive to register with your site, but it still lets people comment (with a bit of a delay) on posts they find interesting. Spammers who target blogs usually do so with automated computer programs that are not designed to go through the process of registering, even if the registration process is relatively simple.
The most important thing you can do to prevent spam on your blog is to pay attention to all of the comments you receive
