Comment spam and malicious links
While Akismet will filter most of the spam comments you will get, unfortunately it can't prevent all of them. But not only are some comments spam, they can link to a malicious website or URL as well.
Beware of too many comments all coming from the same website. This is usually my first red flag that a comment is rotten.
You will also probably notice that in the case of multiple comments from different users from the same website, most of these comments are either ego-stroking comments about what a great writer you are or how awesome your website is, etc. or they are just completely irrelevant or too general. These are also spam.
Two spam websites that often show up in my comments are from minecraft.com and tinyurl.com (don't click this link).
I didn't find anything online suggesting that the minecraft comments were malicious (although they are definitely spam when I got close to 50 irrelevant comments or more from their users), but after doing a Google search on tinyurl.com, I came across this discussion: The question asked was "What is tinyurl.com and why does my antivirus consider it a spy site?"
You can read what people wrote as a response at https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090... but basically the comments from these sites are often links to malicious sites or contain malware or spyware.
So to be safe, not only do I spam these comments, but I never click on the link.
And if I get a comment that MIGHT be real because it actually relates to my post but I'm not sure whether or not to trust where it's coming from, I take the link out of the comment - which by the way, when I started doing that, I got a LOT less spam. If spammers see that you won't allow others to link to their site through your comments, they quickly lose interest in spamming you.
Hope this helps someone!
Recent Comments
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Really good advice! Is it the same tiny url that is actually a great way to generate a tiny url? (If you know what I mean.)
Hi Cheryl,
I think you may be referring to the site where you can take a long url and shorten it up to make it more readable to the visitor? That is called "bitly" if I am not mistaken.
Sec let me go check it out...Yep that is it...Go there if you have long urls you need to shorten...They will not be tiny, but certainly shorter!
Cheers!!
Dave
: )
No, there's one called TinyURL.com. I've used it many times but not lately. I wonder what the difference is because there must be some difference. Almost afraid to click on it, now!!
These are tools to shorten a link so it's easier to place in your copy or whenever you want to share it.
I'm not sure Cheryl. There are a lot of useful sites and downloads online that were created for a legitimate purpose but have lost their trustworthiness because there are people who have used them for illegitimate purposes. This may be one of those sites, but I honestly don't know if this is one of those sites. One of the reasons I started to question all the tinyurl.com comments on my site though besides the reasons I already mentioned is because when I would send an email in response to their questions instead of just leaving another comment on my page, I would always get a message in my inbox that my message didn't send because it was an invalid email address. So then I Googled it and then posted here what I found.
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I am taking links of, but they are still here. Maybe it takes time to rid of them.
The links should go away as soon as you remove them. Are you editing the comment to remove the link?
No, I just remove links from comments. I mean that I am getting enough flattery spam every day to deal with them.
Lol...me too! You'd think I had the greatest website in the world reading some of these things. Sometimes I keep them just for some encouragement, but I don't keep the links. The only links I allow to remain in my comments are from those that have left a comment that actually has something to do with what I wrote about. That's what I learned from the training here, unless I understood the lesson wrong. But I'm pretty sure that's what Kyle taught us.
As I know that you need to remove all links from comments, no exception.
I leave some links on my my comments, like for example, when someone I know or someone from WA comments on a post, I leave the link. I thought we were supposed to do that as a way of helping each other out. Do you know if it hurts our SEO to have links to unrelated niches within our comments?