You are handling your WordPress spam, aren’t you?

If spam is spoiling your blog, check out Akismet, a great WordPress plugin that traps spam comments. It lets you trap, review and even delete these comments automatically.
16 Jul, 2010

Wordpress spam exampleHowever you blog, whether through WordPress or some other platform, if you accept comments you will have experienced that momentary high that comes when you realise your much loved, carefully-crafted post – the one that the World has long been waiting for – has attracted a mountain of comments. And why not? It’s a great post after all, one which draws on a lifetime of experience and which took so many hours to compose. Why shouldn’t it receive comments?

Then comes the cold slap of reality, that cold kipper round the face (see example on right).

These aren’t comments from people who have something real and insightful to say about your post. It’s SPAM – verbal diarrhea, garbage, provided by those whose only interest is in writing a completely irrelevant comment in the hope that it generates traffic and link juice for their own web page. This is usually a pointless exercise anyway – as nobody will read the comment and think “ah, that sounds interesting, I’ll just click through and find out more” and there will generally be no link juice to be gained because the page will either not be valuable enough to have any in the first place, or the site owner would have instructed search engines not to pay attention to these links (see earlier post on using nofollow on your web pages).

The impact of spam extends beyond mere annoyance; it can be rather disruptive to a blog as it can harm a website’s credibility, degrade user experience, and negatively affect SEO rankings. It can also be time-consuming for the blog owner to keep removing manually.

WordPress site owners combat spam using various strategies and tools. Akismet is a plugin that all WordPress site owners can use (free for non-commercial use) to trap spam comments and bin them before they spoil your blog. You can review the comments it traps before deleting them for good, and you can set it so that all trapped comments are automatically deleted after a month. Plugins like Akismet are particularly popular, offering automated spam detection and filtering by analyzing patterns and user feedback. Additionally, configuring WordPress settings to require comment moderation, employing CAPTCHA tests, and restricting comment privileges can further fortify a website against spam. Despite these measures, spam remains a dynamic challenge, requiring constant vigilance and adaptation by web administrators to maintain a clean and professional online presence.

So if spam is still spoiling your blog, take a look at Akismet and make it a problem of the past.

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