One of the first unpleasant surprises a new blogger will encounter is comment spam. After working so hard on creating quality blog content, you wake up one morning to find that your blog is virtually desecrated by trashy ads for adult and pharmacy sites.
You can get hit with hundreds or thousands of them at a time – making it difficult to run your blog – unless you know how to control comment spam.
What is Blog Comment Spam?
Blog comment spam is a desperate, marginally-effective form of mass marketing. It is favored by marketers with unsavory products that are hard to promote through legitimate means. Blog comment spammers’ goal is to leave a link to their site on your blog.
While a vast majority of blogs have “nofollowed” links in the comments, which generally do not help boost your search engine rankings in Google, a few blogs allow people to post followed links that will increase search engine rankings. Blog comment spammers hope to hit on a few of these “dofollow” blogs. Also, some lower-quality search engines (i.e. NOT Google) may give credit “nofollowed” links.
Spammers also want their links to be seen by bloggers and their visitors. They figure that if they blast you with ads for pain pills all the time, you’ll eventually get a headache, click on their link and order some from a “100% reputable” pharmacy in southern Bangladesh. They hope your readers will click on their profile link and check out their goods before you have time to delete it. They figure if they leave 100,000,000 spam comments and 1% of them gets published and 0.001% of those get a response, it will be worth their efforts.
What is Trackback Spam?
Blog trackbacks are a feature of Wordpress that notifies you when another blog links to your post. This helps you and your readers find similar posts and make connections with other bloggers. Trackback spammers will make thousands of low-quality blog posts that “pingback” your blog and create a link back to their post about “Payday Advance Loans” or “Generic Viagra” – which is just an ad for the products they are spamming.
How to Fight Comment Spam in Wordpress
If you are using Wordpress’ native comment system, the first thing to do is to setup Akismet. This will eliminate most comment spam. If some comment spam still sneaks through, you can blacklist specific words in Wordpress dashboard (Settings -> Discussion). Enter the “banned words” into the box and save them, but be careful because if you enter a word like “ass” it will ban any legitimate comments that contain that text-string, such as “assistance” or “assimilation”.
If you are still getting comment spam, install the WP-SpamFree plugin – which is one of the best anti-spam plugins that doesn’t require your readers to jump through extra hoops or enter difficult-to-read CAPTCHA’s into a box before posting. WP-SpamFree also helps control trackback spam.
How to Stop Comment Spam in Disqus
Disqus is a comment management system that is becoming extremely popular in the blogging community. It is available as a downloadable plugin that can easily be installed into Wordpress.
When you install Disqus, you disable Wordpress’ native comment system and manage your comments (and tweak the spam controls) through Disqus’ interface.
Disqus keeps track of your name and avatar, so you don’t have to type it every time you want to leave a quick comment. It also creates a record of all your comment activity on a personalized profile page, which is good for both online reputation management and personal branding. But please remember that your blog comments are all on the permanent “public record” – they can be traced back to you – so think before you write!
To adjust Disqus’ spam settings, go to your Wordpress dashboard. Click Settings -> Disqus, and then click “Settings” in the blue toolbar in the middle of the screen. Here you can block words, and blacklist users or spammers’ IP addresses.
How to Detect “Camouflaged” Spam Comments
Until recently, most blog comment spams were automated cookie-cutter messages done by “bots”. But now spammers are hiring real people to leave thin, one or two sentence comments that specifically address the points in your blog post. These spammers sometimes hide behind real, human-sounding names, rather than commercial keywords – and this makes them difficult to screen out.
You should be on the lookout for very poorly written comments with bad grammar, that confirm that a real human has read you blog post, but otherwise offer little real value or insight. Also carefully scrutinize the URLs that the profile of each comment links to. Does it look legit or is it something commercial like “highbloodpressure.info” or “californialuxuryhomes.com”?
Another nasty trick Disqus spammers are now using is to copy the real, intelligent comments on a blog thread and repost them with a link to their junky profile. They are reposting real, highly-intelligent, on-topic comments that you’ve seen before so it’s incredibly easy to let them slip by.
The Importance of Periodic Maintenance Checks
No matter how carefully you install and adjust the right plugins, and how carefully you read your blog comments, it’s inevitable that some spam comments will slip past your guard. Personally check your comments, especially on your old posts, every couple of months and manually delete the spam that slipped through the cracks. Getting rid of the ugly comment spam that slips through makes your blog look beautiful and credible to search engines and visitors alike!
A guest post by Brett Borders – a Colorado-based blogger and Web strategy consultant. If you want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog, please check out more info here.
Image by jbcurio
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m glad you mentioned Akismet.
The first thing I do when I set up a blog (for anyone, not just me) is turn on the Akismet. It doesn’t catch all my spam but I reckon it nails about 99% of it, I have to manually remove maybe two or three week that sneak through.
I use Intense Debate for my comments, I am forever having to check my spam bin on their site to remove legitimate comments they have labelled as spam.
Akismet is the saviour. I use it on my blog as well, and as you say once or twice a spam goes through but for the most part it works perfect.
Marko,
I use both spam free and Akismet and they are both very effective in handling comment spam. Another really good anti-spam plugin I use is called Bad Behavior
Bad behavior is a bit different in the way it fights spam from the other but also very cool. The unique way bad behavior works is by analyzing the http: request to see if it’s looks spammy.
Other than that I think actively reading and moderating comments will easily catch those very few spam comments that might slip through or actually be written by a human being.
Sounds like an interesting plugin! Yeah, that is what I do, Akismet plus me reading and moderating the comments manually.
I’ve spent so many year as an IT person dealing with spam as it relates to email form. With my blog I just installed Akismet way back when, and never really gave much thought to it.
After reading this post I realize how sophisticated spam in blogging (and other forms) can be. Very interesting.
Yeah, some are very sophisticated, I especially don’t like those that take a real comment and just add some spam link into it.
Thanks for great tips to prevent spam. To stop spamming i have used AntiSpam Bee
Cool article!
Personally, my spam count is about twice the “proper” comment count.. it’s ridiculous! So this article was really helpful, nice one.
Just to add a quick note… if you do add Askimet, make sure that you go through it every now and again, as sometime it catches comments which aren’t actually spam.
I’ve been using Akismet ever since I first started my blog and have only just started using WP-SpamFree so it will be interesting to see if it reduces the spam down a bit, having a DoFollow blog always seems to entice those pesky spammers in, but it’s mainly wasting their time not ours
Great!! this information really important thanks for the precious tips to preventing spam…doing gr8 impressed countinue this efforts thanx
Hey! Funny I just saw this post referenced in your newsletter (Jan. 20/2010).
Just so happens it’s the same day I wrote a post about a really funny spam comment I got on my blog and how Askimet has come to the rescue zapping it as spam before it became a nuissance. I won’t create a hotlink to it (comment spam, perhaps) but if anyone would like to read it the post title is
“Askimet, I am very love you free” .
Cheers!
Don Power