How to Quickly Identify Comment Spam
Spam can be a big problem for new blogs. The last thing you want on your page is a bunch of spammy looking comments, links to places that sell fake Oakleys, or advice on enhancing your "performance" in the bed room. These types of comments hurt your credibility, and can even hinder your position in search engine rankings.
Here's a quick guide to identifying spam.
I'll grab a few comments from my spam queue for examples. Here are some real easy-to-identify spam comments:
Submitted on 2012/07/11 at 1:11 am
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Submitted on 2012/07/10 at 6:19 pm
Do you know that your debt with the regular home has ended $15, 000 inside charge cards by yourself? quick loan Service fees quick loan When will i employ?
Submitted on 2012/07/10 at 5:10 am
How Long Does It Take To Work Withdrawal Symptoms Read Finasteride Prescription Viagra Without Medical 10 Prozac Viagra Trazodone Treatment Online Tramadol Without Prescription Pain Killer
These are all very obvious spammers. Any one can pick these up with relative ease. The trouble lies within...
Again, some samples:
Submitted on 2012/07/10 at 7:40 am
I ran into this page by accident, amazingly, this is the amazing internet site
Submitted on 2012/07/08 at 1:58 pm
Great – I should definitely pronounce, impressed with your site. I had no trouble navigating through all the tabs and related information ended up being truly simple to do to access. I recently found what I hoped for before you know it at all. Reasonably unusual. Is likely to appreciate it for those who add forums or anything, website theme . a tones way for your customer to communicate. Excellent task.
Submitted on 2012/07/08 at 12:36 pm
Does your blog have a contact page? I’m having problems locating it but, I’d like to shoot you an e-mail. I’ve got some recommendations for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great website and I look forward to seeing it develop over time.
Submitted on 2012/07/07 at 8:17 pm
Wow, marvelous weblog layout! How long have you been running a blog for? you made running a blog glance easy. The overall look of your web site is fantastic, as smartly as the content!
At first glance, a lot of these comments look legitimate. However, they're all robotic spammers trying to gain traffic for the spam URLs they include with their comments.
All of the comments were left on articles I've written, but they all ignore the content of the article and comment on either the format of my site, "missing" pages, or ask completely irrelevant questions. If someone leaves you a comment that has nothing to do with the content of the article you've written, delete it immediately. If someone has a valid concern or a personal question, they'll email you and not leave a comment on a random article.
1. Comments left on privacy policy, terms of service, or contact pages are almost always spam. There is no reason any one should ever comment on one of these pages. Turn comments off here and save yourself the trouble.
2. Comments that say your blog doesn't open in a specific browser or on a mobile device are always spam. Delete them.
3. Comments on your layout, the theme you've chosen, or ones that ask how long you've been running a website are flattering, but they're spam. Delete them.
4. ALWAYS CHECK THE NAME AND THE URL. This is the most important thing to look for. Keep an eye out from a comment that only uses obvious keywords as a name. The same goes for the URL. If it looks likes a spammy URL that includes drug names, anything about loans, ends in .ru, or just looks fishy, delete the comment.
5. Install Akismet. It will automatically search through your comments for spam and mark them as such. Let it do all of the hard moderation work for you. Best of all, it's free.
Keep your sites clean!
Recent Comments
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Great post. For the more 'elaborate' sites installing Disqus is also quite a good way of stopping spam and managing commenting. I must say when I got started with comments I was very pleased to see the amount of people praising my theme/site... took me a while to figure out they were actually nefarious!
Speaking of themes and content, your blog posts and tutorials here are always really beautiful! Thanks for your effort.
What you had written is true. I myself have gotten a lot of spammy looking comments on my blog. Their comments are very irrelevant to what I've posted.
Kind of funny that you posted this. I was just going through all the spam comments on one of my sites. I ignore them for the most part, but I actually found a real comment! The first one for my blog. Unfortunately, the comment was made in april and I just found it, but oh well.
One other thing I'll do if I'm not sure is I'll google the entire comment. If a bunch of other blogs show up with the same comment, then I know it was a spam comment.
Great article I always wonder about some of those comments I just delete them if they are not related to my post but and Askimet does a good job but does not catch everything.
From one of my sites:
Akismet has protected your site from 145,311 spam comments already.
There are 3,365 comments in your spam queue right now.
That's about 80 spam comments per day. Akismet saves a lot of time.
A great explanation of what to look for in identifying spam, another tip is to set a time limit for the article or post to accept comments after publication. You can find this setting in the Wordpress admin panel under "settings", and then under discussions. If you have a good ranking and relevant page, that is forgotten and still has comments enabled, spammers will find that page like flies will find a good cow dump! And if you do not have Akismet installed....run for cover!
My first blog went out of control because of SPAM!! Since then, I have decided to use AKISMET! Now, the world is different! lol :)
Comment spam is THE biggest pain in the you-know-what!
Thanks for sharing these tips for identifying it and what to do about it... I'm sure it will really help new blog owners.
Jennifer
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Some nice tips Steve. How do you feel about trackbacks/pingbacks? do you approve them or ignore?
Depends on where the links are coming from. I only really approve pingbacks if they come in from a site I know and trust, but 99% of the time, I just delete them.
Yep, same here.