Controlling Comment Spam On Your Blog

Comment Spam On Your Blog

If you have a setup a blog and regularly post quality content you have undoubtedly come across someone try to comment on your post with either blatant self promotion, a simple “great post” offering no substance or just the insertion of hundreds of links.

It is unfortunate, however blogging is all about sharing thoughts, ideas and being part of a online community. So how do you ensure that you actively participate in this community and allow legitimate reader to engage with you?

Well if your using the ever-popular blogging platform WordPress there are a few very effective actions that can be taken to reduce Comment Spam On Your Blog.

Why Do People Comment Spam On Your Blog

There are many reasons that people or companies add spam comments to blogs. The two most common reasons are:

• Trying to get a backlink from your website to their website
• Trying to get a increase in traffic to their website using their link in your comments

Comment spammers basically look to get their own links in the comments of as many blogs as possible. They feel that this way they can increase the number of backlinks pointing to a domain and achieve higher search engine rankings.

The reality is that having thousands of links from different websites linking to your domain is not always going to rank you higher.

Take for example that there are two websites dedicated to computer software:

• Website A has 100 links coming in from computer software websites
• Website B has 200 links coming in from websites on different topics.

Website A will most likely have a better search engine ranking as the links coming in are coming from similar topic sites. This gives weight to your website by using relevance. This example does not take into consideration the Page Rank or any other elements of the websites.

What to Do To Control Comment Spam On Your Blog

• Askimet Plugin – When you setup a WordPress blog, this should be one of the first plugins that you install and enable. Askimet (Automattic Kismet) is one of the best developed plugins for Controlling Comment Spam On Your Blog.
• Modify the number of links allowed in a comment – By modifying the number the links that a reader can add to a comment, you will dramatically lower the number of comments that contain hundreds of links (ultimate spam).
• Pre-approve comments from commenters whose comments have previously been approved
• Moderate all comments – This may sound like over-kill, however unless you receive hundreds of comments or are extremely short on time and cannot moderate comments, this is a surefire way to Control Comment Spam On Your Blog.

Ultimately if you are posting regularly to your blog you will no doubt be aware when somebody has posted a comment. It only takes a few seconds to review a comment and delete it if it has passed through the filters that you have setup to Control Comment Spam On Your Blog.