Reconnecting...
I was just helping out with another discussion and thought of something that I've wanted to share with folks at WA for some time.
I want to discuss wordpress SPAM comments.
99% of comments that our team sees on WordPress websites is spam. There are services out there that spam the heck out of WordPress and other websites.
What many people do not know is that Comment spam can really hurt your website rankings. Now, you may be thinking that you're OK because you do not approve them, but that's not necessarily true.
WordPress does not function well when you have lots of comments, and when you have 1000's of comments in your Trash that are not deleted, then you are hurting the speed of which your website runs. A slow site will rank worse than one that is nice and speedy.
I wanted to let everyone know about TWO plugins that can really help with keeping your spam to a minimum.
1 - Askimet. You may have heard about Askimet before as they have been around for a long time. Askimet is a plugin that can keep spam to a minimum by filtering out messages from known spam sources. This is a plugin that we bundle with all WordPress Express installations at WA. It is free to register and it is an excellent way to help prevent spam comments from being posted on your site.
2 - Askimet will discover what is spam, but they will not stop it outright. To stop auto-spam bots from posting on your site you can add a CAPTCHA which requires people to type in some characters that a computer cannot read. There is a WordPress plugin that I've used called SI Captcha, and it's quite good.
3 - Set your comments to require moderation. If you set your comments so that ADMIN (yourself) must approve them, then you are the final guard against spam comments. I encourage people to manually approve comments so that your site does not get hurt in SEO by linking to all kinds of other known spam sources.
Do not forget to delete your trash. There will be comments in your trash that are still there and are slowing down your website. You need to keep your trash nice and clean. Having a few hundred in there is OK, but we have see member websites that have 50,000 or 100,000 spam posts in their trash and it causes their sites to grind to a halt and barely load. Don't let this be you!
The plugins I've mentioned above are:
=> Askimet
=> SI Captcha
You do not need to use both (or either), but you should be using some kind of spam comment prevention plugin. Just don't forget to keep your pending, spam, and trash free from 1000's of posts and you will not have any trouble with comments slowing you down!
Carson
Join the Discussion
Ainura
Premium
i have both Askimet and SI catchpa and it was ok but today things got mad. i got 40 spam comments in 2 hours and they keep coming. that is real spam like with some even unreadable text, just a set of words. they of course get to the approval queue and I keep clicking Spam it but they still keep coming. what else can i do to prevent this?
Reply
Jaweda2k
Premium
That is interesting as I have not seen anything like that while using those two plugins. Overall though, unless it becomes something that happens more frequently, I would not worry much about it. Just delete them and move on. If it does pick up and keep happening then I would look further into it.
gmee
Premium
I added the WP plugin JetPack the other day. It has a bunch of functions, one of which is changing your comment form from the stock WP form to the one used on wordpress.com (for their free sites.)
My spam went from over 1k a day (with askimet) to... 20. Everything else either doesn't make it through the Jetpack system or is immediately dumped. Now I can actually look through the spam and see if any real comments landed there (a couple have.)
Jetpack also does wp.com stats and a bunch of other things. Just go to your plugins > add new > jetpack. It'll pop up and you go from there.
My spam went from over 1k a day (with askimet) to... 20. Everything else either doesn't make it through the Jetpack system or is immediately dumped. Now I can actually look through the spam and see if any real comments landed there (a couple have.)
Jetpack also does wp.com stats and a bunch of other things. Just go to your plugins > add new > jetpack. It'll pop up and you go from there.
ThatGuyDev
Premium
Since my site has such a strong social end of it with BuddyPress and BBPress I have a very consistent stream of bot sign ups on my site. Usually they're accounts remain empty for a couple days then a spam group is created for whatever spam company the bot is. I tried a bunch of methods, including SI Captcha with little results (maybe it just didn't mesh well with my theme).. Finally I found the plug in "Super Captcha"..which is admittedly quite ugly. However, since activating it a month or so ago it has blocked around 150 fake sign ups. I'd recommend checking it out in addition to the above suggestions
Shawn Martin
Premium
I got through once a week, may more, and clear out any unapproved spam and delete them permanently. Same with the trash, gotta take it out. The plug ins work wonders.
slayton1s
Premium
I use both these plugins. However, I like to allow people to post comments without moderation by me, and I normally set it to where 3 links are allowed. Akismet does a great job at blocking out the bulk of the spam comments, sometimes even legitimate comments; which is why I set it to 3 links max. But it's a great tool nonetheless. This is good information for somebody who isn't very familiar with plugins and spam sites like ScrapeBox for sure.
Carson
Premium
When someone is leaving a comment there is really no reason to allow a link. As soon as you allow a link you're asking for spam.
Askimet does a VERY good job of finding spam and they use technology other than looking at the content. They have massive databases of known spam sources and they use this in their algorithms for determining if content is spam.
Spam is not always automated though, and this is why I usually require comments to be moderated. Getting back links (which isn't all that important any more) from an unsuspecting website is easy if they allow links and you provide a decent comment. As a website owner, you have much less control if you allow comments to be posted without moderation, and you're asking for spam if you allow links. There is NO way someone needs to post 3 links within a comment. Absolutely no reason.
Askimet does a VERY good job of finding spam and they use technology other than looking at the content. They have massive databases of known spam sources and they use this in their algorithms for determining if content is spam.
Spam is not always automated though, and this is why I usually require comments to be moderated. Getting back links (which isn't all that important any more) from an unsuspecting website is easy if they allow links and you provide a decent comment. As a website owner, you have much less control if you allow comments to be posted without moderation, and you're asking for spam if you allow links. There is NO way someone needs to post 3 links within a comment. Absolutely no reason.
Carson
Premium
You will get less spam Seth. As soon as a spam server (bot) determines that you allow links, you're added to their list and it just spawns from there. If a bot tries to post and fails to get the back link, it won't spread the word that your website is a place that allows back links. That covers the auto posting part.
There are many SPAM services out there that user humans to post spam too. These people will get through your CAPTCHA if you have one, but as soon as they post and it goes into moderation, your website is OFF the list so to speak.
A valuable comment will have NO link in it 99.999% of the time. If you want to allow links to be posted without moderation then you should not allow any links...zero.
There are many SPAM services out there that user humans to post spam too. These people will get through your CAPTCHA if you have one, but as soon as they post and it goes into moderation, your website is OFF the list so to speak.
A valuable comment will have NO link in it 99.999% of the time. If you want to allow links to be posted without moderation then you should not allow any links...zero.
